SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Described in treatises mainly published between 1768 and 1950 (such as William Holdsworth and William Aldridge's Natural Short-Hand), musical stenography used quickly written squiggles and dots in an attempt to preserve, in print and in real time, the ______features of live performances—those that result from impromptu deviations of performers when fidelity to an established musical score is not mandated.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

The metal displayed in the structure of House in Kamiaraya by Kazuto Nishi Architects and the metal hardware in UE House by GENETO are representative aspects of a juxtaposition common in contemporary Japanese architecture: the ______of sleek, contemporary elements and traditional organic materials in a single design is a trend with both aesthetic and highly practical purposes.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

The following text is from Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd. In the text, the narrator describes an open tract of land.

 

The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf.

 

As used in the text, what does the word "obtrusive" most nearly mean?

A study by a team including finance professor Madhu Veeraraghavan suggests that exposure to sunshine during the workday can lead to overly optimistic behavior. Using data spanning from 1994 to 2010 for a set of US companies, the team compared over 29,000 annual earnings forecasts to the actual earnings later reported by those companies. The team found that the greater the exposure to sunshine at work in the two weeks before a manager submitted an earnings forecast, the more the manager's forecast exceeded what the company actually earned that year.

 

Which choice best states the function of the underlined sentence in the overall structure of the text?

R.D. Lawrence et al. found that a recommender system (RS)—an algorithm that generates personalized product suggestions for online shoppers—impacted consumer behavior and increased sales, a result that was corroborated by Dokyun Lee and Kartik Hosanagar. However, Lee and Hosanagar also determined that whereas an RS had a stronger positive effect on item views for utilitarian products (e.g., dish detergents) than for hedonic products (e.g., music albums), the RS had a stronger positive effect on likelihood of purchase for

hedonic products than for utilitarian ones.

Information in the text best supports which statement about recommender systems?

Text 1

The University of California, Irvine, and the online class provider edX are two of the many institutions offering training programs in entrepreneurship. But what results do such programs produce? In a study of businesspeople in Spain, researcher Natalia Cruz and colleagues addressed this question and reported that participants who received entrepreneurial training showed high innovativeness in entrepreneurial activities.

Text 2

While studies of entrepreneurial training typically report positive results, a close look at these studies reveals widespread methodological shortcomings. This research literature is plagued by unclear hypotheses,insufficient sample sizes, a lack of control groups, and failures to establish pretraining baselines for the measured attributes of participants.

Based on the texts, the author of Text 2 would most like to know the answer to which question about Cruz and colleagues' study that is not addressed in Text 1?

Vegetation has two primary mechanisms by which it reduces air pollution: deposition (absorption of pollutants) and, the more effective, dispersion (dilution of pollutants by ventilation). Accordingly, establishment of green space to reduce major air pollutants such as coarse particulate matter in urban areas receives considerable attention. Research by Zander S. Venter et al. comprised data from air-quality monitoring stations in Belgium, the US state of West Virginia, and thousands of other global locations over a ten-year span, coupled with aerial imagery of those locations from the same period. The researchers ultimately recommended that reducing anthropogenic emissions remain the primary focus of urban air-quality improvement efforts.

Which finding from the study, if true, would most directly account for the recommendation by Venter et al.?

The following text is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston's 1921 short story "John Redding Goes to Sea." John is a child who lives in a town in the woods.

 

Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the folk there in the Florida woods for he was an imaginative child and fond of day-dreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grow numerous palms, luxuriant magnolias and bay trees. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. [John Redding] loved to wander down to the water's edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and [he] wanted to follow them.

 

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Due to the Chorotega region's accessibility, various types of forested areas were converted to cattle pasture as rising international meat prices drove a cattle ranching boom in the 1960s and 1970s. Juan Pablo Arroyo- Mora and colleagues used historical aerial photography and remote sensing data to track fragmentation metrics across different land use capability classes (categories that indicate possible uses of forest land). One such metric, edge density, can be used to indicate the regularity of forest patch sizes, with decreases in edge density suggesting a trend towards uninterrupted forest patches with more regular shapes. The team found a range of edge density levels, from lows of around 80 meters per hectare or less in the 1960s and 1970s for all classes, to a high in 1986 of approximately ______.

 

Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to complete the assertion?

Studies of the population density of cougars (Puma concolor) have yielded a range of results, which may in part reflect differences in the effectiveness of the methods that researchers have used in their studies. For example, the difference between the maximum population density reported by Linda L. Sweanor et al. and that reported by David M. Choate et al. might be artificially large if the use of ______.

 

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to complete the example?

Neuroscientist Artin Arshamian and his team sought to determine what affects a person's perception of an odor as pleasant: is it culture, personal taste, or aspects of human anatomy? The team assessed odor preferences in ten groups of people with different modes of living (urban, agricultural, and hunter-gatherer) including the Maniq people from a small community in Thailand and urban dwellers from a large city in Mexico. The team observed that across cultures, people generally rated odors about the same: ethyl butyrate, which smells like peaches, was typically rated more pleasant than mushroom alcohol, which smells like fungus. The team's study thus undermined the idea that ______.

 

Which choice most logically completes the text?

A soil's microbial community (the microbial taxa present in their relative abundances) is known to affect plants' cyclical processes. Corrine Walsh and colleagues hypothesized that microbial communities could also affect plants' flavor chemistry, including volatiles and secondary metabolites like glucosinolates. Recognizing that soil moisture varies by location in the wild and could influence plants' chemistry, Walsh et al. introduced distinct microbial communities to individually potted mustard plants (Brassica juncea) growing in a controlled environment, then measured the plants' glucosinolates, like butenyl and allyl (the most prominent), that create the spicy and bitter flavors in mustard. This method thus enabled the researchers to ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Louisiana resident P.B.S. Pinchback, one of the nearly two thousand African Americans elected to public office during the decade that followed the Civil War, ______his term as a member of the state senate in 1868.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

The legacy of the Spanish Empire, which once controlled portions of five continents, is evident in Spanish-speaking Paraguay, one of many places that reveal their imperial history in their language. Contrast Paraguay with the Netherlands, which ceased to be part of the empire in ______the latter's connection to the empire is so attenuated that Spanish is seldom spoken there today.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

To serve local families during the Great Depression, innovative New York City librarian Pura Belpré offered storytelling in both English and Spanish, an uncommon ______ celebrated el Día de los Tres Reyes Magos, an important community holiday; and put on puppet shows dramatizing Puerto Rican folktales.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

The neurotechnology company Neuros Medical is working on an exciting new technology: a process that uses bioelectric signals to target sensory nerves to help relieve pain. Neuros Medical's technology, alongside other such neuromodulation technologies that function by stimulating nervous system structures, ______the way for future advancements in neurotechnology.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Rabinal Achí is a precolonial Maya dance drama performed annually in Rabinal, a town in the Guatemalan highlands. Based on events that occurred when Rabinal was a city-state ruled by a king, ______ had once been an ally of the king but was later captured while leading an invading force against him.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Aftermath the Kings and Their Biographies is one of the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that have survived from roughly the sixteenth century to the present ______ being passed down through private libraries in the city of Timbuktu, Mali. Many of these manuscripts can be found at the Al-Imam Essayouti Library.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

As can be seen in the case of The Dial, a New York magazine published from July 1920 to July 1929, some small periodicals influential in the development of the modernist movement have been explored in depth by scholars. The London magazine Voices (1919), ______remains among those modernist periodicals "of interest and significance about which relatively little is known," according to scholars Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

In his meta-analysis of recent studies of animal information cascades, Joseph S. McCormick presents several examples of adaptive cascades (i.e., information transfers that benefit a collective), including one that involves humpback whales. However, not all cascades are beneficial. ______his meta-analysis cites one study that described how black-throated blue warblers followed flock-mates' choice of habitat even when that habitat lacked adequate vegetative cover.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

When designing costumes for film, American artist Suttirat Larlarb typically custom fits the garments to each actor. ______ for the film Sunshine, in which astronauts must reignite a dying Sun, she designed a golden spacesuit and had a factory reproduce it in a few standard sizes; lacking a tailor-made quality, the final creations reflected the ungainliness of actual spacesuits.

 

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

To determine the approximate age of wooden tools excavated from an archaeological site in Spain, archaeologist Joseba Rios-Garaizar and colleagues collected samples of sediments surrounding the tools; these samples were then analyzed using a method known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating.______ OSL dating indicated that the tools were between 50,000 and 137,000 years old.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

 While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

·Grain was used as commodity money in ancient Sumer.

·In a commodity money economy, specific goods act as a common unit of monetary exchange that can be used to buy and sell other goods.

·In a barter economy, goods are traded directly between parties without the use of money.

·Economists Bruce Champ and Scott Freeman: bartering requires that "the person with whom you wish to trade must not only have what you want but also want what you have. The inefficiency is apparent; a great deal of time is spent merely finding someone with whom to trade."

·Champ and Freeman: when "individuals might come to accept one particular good in exchange for others even if they do not wish to consume that good...barter economies essentially become monetary economies."

 

The student wants to paraphrase a quotation from Champ and Freeman to explain the inefficiency of barter economies. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from

the notes to accomplish this goal?

 

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

·In the 1940s, geneticist Barbara McClintock discovered mobile segments of DNA.

·McClintock called these segments "controlling elements," but they are now commonly known as transposable elements (TEs).

·TEs are capable of altering gene expression as they change position within a cell's genome.

·In 1950, geneticist Esther Lederberg discovered a process (the lysogenic cycle) by which bacteria-infecting viruses (phages) pass their genetic material to a host cell's descendants.

·Phage DNA will enter a bacterial host cell and incorporate itself into the host cell's genome.

·When the host cell divides, the phage DNA replicates along with the host's DNA.

The student wants to compare McClintock's discovery with Lederberg's. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

·Atoms in a solid state are ordered and cannot move freely; atoms in a liquid state are disordered and can move three-dimensionally.

·Under high pressure and heat, potassium forms an unusual dual structure: a solid lattice of atoms (the host) surrounds partially liquid atom chains (the guest).

·This hybrid state (chain melt) was previously thought to be a transitional phase between solid and liquid states.

·A 2019 study confirmed that even under extreme heat, the host structure remained solid while the guest structure did not become fully liquid.

·These guest atoms exhibited disorder but were confined to one-dimensional movement by the host.

·Chain melt was determined to be a stable, distinct state.

The student wants to explain why potassium is not fully liquid in a chain melt state. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

·The factors that affect clutch size (the number of eggs laid at one time) have been well studied in birds but not in lizards.

·A team led by Shai Meiri of Tel Aviv University investigated which factors influence lizard clutch size.

·Meiri's team obtained clutch-size and habitat data for over 3,900 lizard species and analyzed the data with statistical models.

·Larger clutch size was associated with environments in higher latitudes that have more seasonal change.

·Lizards in higher-latitude environments may lay larger clutches to take advantage of shorter windows of favorable conditions.

The student wants to emphasize the aim of the research study. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?