SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

The work of Kiowa painter T.C. Cannon derives its power in part from the tension among his ______ influences: classic European portraiture, with its realistic treatment of faces; the American pop art movement, with its vivid colors; and flatstyle, the intertribal painting style that rejects the effect of depth typically achieved through shading and perspective.

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

Close analysis of the painting Girl with a Flute, long attributed to the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, has revealed subtle deviations from the artist's signature techniques. These variations suggest that the work may be that of a student under Vermeer's tutelage—potentially ______ our understanding of Vermeer as a solitary artist.

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

The following text is adapted from Oscar Wilde's 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest.

 

CECILY: Have we got to part?

ALGERNON: I am afraid so. It's a very painful parting.

CECILY: It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

 

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

The following text is from Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). The narrator and two friends are taking a boat down the River Thames in England.

In a boat I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that he is doing everything. Harris's notion was, that it was he alone who had been working, and that both George and I had been imposing upon him. George, on the other hand, ridiculed the idea of Harris's having done anything more than eat and sleep, and had a cast-iron opinion that it was he—George himself—who had done all the labour worth speaking of.

Which choice best describes the main purpose of the text?

Text 1

In a seminal 1979 study, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky presented students and college faculty from Israel, Sweden, and the United States with hypothetical questions involving financial decisions. Finding that participants' responses indicated that losses have a greater psychological impact than equivalent gains do, the researchers formulated the concept of loss aversion, which has since informed research in fields ranging from cognitive psychology to transportation studies.

 

 

Text 2

Eyal Ert and Ido Erev conducted an experiment in which two groups of Israeli students were exposed to financial choices that involved potential losses of either relatively minor sums of money, such as 10 Israeli shekels (low-stakes contexts), or more substantial sums, such as 100 Israeli shekels (high-stakes contexts). The researchers concluded that only the latter contexts were associated with loss aversion.

 

Based on the texts, how would Ert and Erev (Text 2) most likely respond to Kahneman and Tversky's finding (Text 1)?

The Silence of Dean Maitland is one of twenty-five works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reissued in 2020 in a project professing to give overdue credit to authors by replacing nonfemale pseudonyms with the authors' given female names (crediting Mary Tuttiett rather than Maxwell Gray, in this case). Olivia Rutigliano and other scholars cite a lack of nuance and erasure of intention in the implication that pseudonymous identities were invariably necessary due to social roles, appropriately contending that what may have been a constraint for some was an elective exercise in self-fashioning for others.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Postcranial skeletal pneumaticity (PSP), a system of skeletal air sacs, occurred in three Cretaceous clades, including pterosaurs (e.g., Pteranodon); past studies have hypothesized that the trait was homologous (originating from a shared ancestor). With this in mind, Tito Aureliano et al examined fossils of common ancestors of the clades using microtomography, finding openings in bones—a possible indicator of PSP—but of sizes inconsistent with PSP. The team reported other findings contradicting the homology hypothesis as well, concluding that PSP likely evolved independently in each clade.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

As the second-most populous continent in the world, Africa was home to an estimated 1.186 billion people in 2015. In a paper for a social studies class, a student nonetheless notes that countries with very large populations may be less densely populated than are countries with much smaller populations, as can be seen by comparing ______.

 

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

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City has an exhibition of video games that includes Vib-Ribbon from 1999, which museum visitors can play on site, and SimCity 2000 from 1994, which visitors can see only in a video presentation. MOMA claims the video presentations are only for games that would be impractical to display in a playable form, but video games are an inherently interactive medium, a feature that is grossly absent in a video-only presentation.

 

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

Several sociologists have observed that the word "culture," though commonly used in academic literature, is an ultimately hazy concept—for example, Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt have noted that "many critics have pointed to the vagueness of the concept of culture." Does the concept of culture encompass knowledge, or laws, or both these things and others? For casual usage, such haziness is permissible—we know culture when we see it—but for researchers, a standardization of the term is called for if sociology is to truly progress.

 

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

Few of the most commercially successful films in US movie theaters are in a language other than English. One journalist claims that to overcome what director Bong Joon-ho calls "the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles," it is essential for a film to receive an Oscar nomination: non-English language films that are not given this public indication of high quality will struggle to find an audience compared with those that do receive Oscar nominations.

 

Which choice best describes data from the table that weaken the journalist's claim?

Text 1

The land that became Grande Terre island split from remnants of the former supercontinent Gondwana approximately 80 million years ago, carrying Gondwanan biota with it, and experienced periodic submersion until 37 million years ago. Some researchers posit that the island's current biota includes members of Gondwanan clades (i.e., clades predating the split) that persisted by seeking temporary refuge on nearby islands during submergence events.

Text 2

In a recent study, Prashant Sharma and Gonzalo Giribet found that the crown age—the age of the most recent common ancestor of all species in the clade (i.e., the clade's founder)—is 48.9 million years for Grande Terre's clade of harvest spiders. Most of the island's extant biota belong to clades with younger crown ages, however: Jerome Murienne et al. found that the crown age of Grande Terre's clade of cockroaches is 2.7 million years, for example.

Taken together, Text 1 and Text 2 best support which statement about the clades of harvest spiders and cockroaches on Grande Terre?

Uncle Vanya: Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts is an 1898 play by Anton Chekhov, originally written in Russian. In the play, Professor Serebrakoff and his wife Helena have come to stay at their country estate, which Vanya manages with the help of Sonia, the professor's daughter from a previous marriage. Chekhov portrays Vanya as feeling underappreciated by the professor, as is evident when_______.

Which quotation from a translation of Uncle Vanya most effectively illustrates the claim?

In 2008, the US state of Hawaii enacted rate stability regulations (RSRs), constraining insurance companies' latitude to raise premiums (the periodic fees policyholders pay to maintain insurance policies) after policies are in effect. RSRs are effective at protecting existing policyholders from price volatility, but Naoki Aizawa and Ami Ko note that since dynamic pricing of premiums is an important risk-mitigation tool for insurers, RSRs may lead some insurers to scale back or entirely cease selling new policies in the affected market, thereby reducing the competitive pressure that typically restrains premium prices for new policies. Thus, Hawaii's RSRs may__________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Saeed M.Z.A. Tarabieh conducted a study of consumer attitudes toward Jordanian food and beverage companies and found that for consumers who value environmental conservation, their likelihood of purchasing a product decreased when their perception of the product's risk of causing environmental harm increased. Subsequently, other researchers conducted a study of various demographic groups in Vietnam, investigating participants' intentions to purchase a new skin-care product, and found that, on average, parents of small children had the lowest perception among all the demographic groups in the study of the environmental risks of the skin-care product. Assuming that the results of Tarabieh's study are broadly applicable, this finding suggests that_________.

 

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Trade with neighboring civilizations contributed to the success of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which reigned in Mesopotamia from around 911 BCE to 609 BCE. By supplying grain, textiles, and tin to societies that lacked these valuable_________Neo-Assyrian Empire grew not only in wealth but also in power and influence.

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

In a 2018 study, Ceri Shipton et al. concluded that stone tools excavated from an archaeological site in Saudi Arabia date to between 197,000 and 276,000 years ago. The reliability of the dates that Shipton et al. have posited, which were obtained through processes that determined when buried mineral grains surrounding the tools were last exposed to sunlight,_________in part upon the researchers' exclusion of mineral grains that lacked adequate sun exposure before burial.

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

Writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia's love of short fiction began when she read a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories as a child, and she later would become a prolific short story writer herself publishing pieces like "Jackals"(2015) and "Year of the Monkey" (2008). Yet she's best________ever since her 2020 novel Mexican Gothic saw widespread critical and commercial success, as a novelist.

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

Writing in hieroglyphs, ancient Egyptians recorded measurements using units such as the sa, a unit of _______and the khar, a unit of volume. The sa, for instance, is written as a hieroglyph that looks like a duck or goose.

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

While most animals prefer the safety of nighttime migration, many poisonous amphibians—a category that includes the striped newt and the Asian common toad—safely engage in migratory behavior during the day. _______with the sun in the sky, the amphibians' striking color patterns deter visually oriented daytime predators by serving as a warning of toxicity.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

When soil becomes contaminated by toxic metals, it can be removed from the ground and disposed of in a landfill._________contaminated soil can be detoxified via phytoremediation: plants that can withstand high concentrations of metals absorb the pollutants and store them in their shoots, which are then cut off and safely disposed of, preserving the health of the plants.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Plato believed material objects to be crude representations of unseen ideal forms. In his view, such abstract, nonmaterial forms are the ultimate source of knowledge. Aristotle disagreed, positing that knowledge is best obtained through direct engagement with the material world; ______ sensory experience of the material is the ultimate source of knowledge.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Magnetic levitation (maglev) trains are suspended above a track by powerful electromagnets, reducing friction and thus allowing for much faster speeds. Though maglev advocates in the US have long imagined these trains crisscrossing the country, their dream remains unrealized. ______ of the handful of maglev trains currently in operation, all are in Asia.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

·The magnificent frigatebird (fregata magnificens) is a species of seabird that feeds mainly on fish, tuna, squid, and other small sea animals.

·It is unusual among seabirds in that it doesn't dive into the water for prey.

·One way it acquires food is by using its hook-tipped bill to snatch prey from the surface of the water.

·Another way it acquires food is by taking it from weaker birds by force.

·This behavior is known as kleptoparasitism.

The student wants to emphasize a similarity between the two ways a magnificent frigatebird acquires food. 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 popular wood-wide web theory posits that trees can communicate and exchange resources with one another via common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs) of fungi.

·Ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard first suggested this theory in 1997.

·She described trees as "super-cooperators."

·In the 2022 study "The Decay of the Wood-Wide Web?," mycologist Dr. Justine Karst and colleagues evaluated dozens of CMN studies.

·They write that CMNs "have captured the interest of broad audiences. We are concerned, however, that recent claims about CMNs in forests are disconnected from evidence."

The student wants to use a quotation to emphasize a potential problem with the wood-wide web theory. 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 Gullah are a group of African Americans who have lived in parts of the southeastern United States since the 18th century.

·Gullah culture is influenced by West African and Central African traditions.

·Louise Miller Cohen is a Gullah historian, storyteller, and preservationist.

·She founded the Gullah Museum of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, in 2003.

·Vermelle Rodrigues is a Gullah historian, artist, and preservationist.

·She founded the Gullah Museum of Georgetown, South Carolina, in 2003.

The student wants to emphasize the duration and purpose of Cohen's and Rodrigues's work. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?