SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Some ethicists challenge the concept of personal character, claiming that if it were meaningful, situational factors could not, as they clearly can, induce behavior contrary to that character. As Rachana Kamtekar observes, this argument is difficult to reconcile with our lay conception of character: we expect a person of helpful character to be frequently helpful,not__________helpful.

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

Studying menus from nineteenth-century restaurants, old coupons clipped out of newspapers, and posters promoting concerts by long-forgotten musicians may seem like a frivolous pursuit, but ephemeral objects like these are useful as evidence of cultural change: they can________shifts in norms, values, and concerns that traditional objects of historical inquiry may not.

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

In the architectural process called modular construction, a building is manufactured in modules under controlled conditions and then assembled at its intended location.__________of this approach cite the production of less material waste and a faster return on investment.

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

The Reckoning and Resilience (2022) exhibition at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, was curated to feature the work of thirty North Carolina artists. The included artists represent a wide variety of artistic disciplines, from painters such as Juan Logan to the sculptor Stephen Hayes. In its inclusion of many borrowed works,the exhibition is atypical for the Nasher Museum, which tends to curate its exhibitions around the permanent collection of contemporary art that it owns.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Text 1 is T. L. Hulme's 1912 poem "Above the Dock." Text 2 is from Amy Lowell's 1912 poem "The Crescent Moon."

Text 1

Above the quiet dock in mid night,

Tangled in the tall mast's corded height,

Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away

Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play.

Text 2

Slipping softly through the sky

Little horned,happy moon,

Can you hear me up so high?

Will you come down soon?

Which choice best describes a notable difference in how the speaker of Text 1 and the speaker of Text 2 portray the moon?

The Heege Manuscript (HM) is a collection of booklets of once-unbound paper sheets on which Richard Heege copied various texts at his fifteenth-century home between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in England. Most other contemporaneous personal manuscripts like the Findern Anthology (FA) consist primarily of pices by celebrated medieval authors like Hoccleve and other readings favored by elites,whereas the HM has a distinctive emphasis on the popular, including entertainments like crude comedies, and the practical, with advice about manners.

 

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

Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth's research into the debt defaults of Philip II (who ruled an empire including Spain and much of Belgium from 1556 to 1598) relates to other work on European early modern state finance, including Hoffman and Norberg's research on the relationship between state finance and political development. But Drelichman and Voth's unique contribution to the field is their reconstruction of the earliest extant set of annual fiscal records for any sovereign state, demonstrating in turn that Philip's defaults were caused by short-term cash shortages, not long-term unsustainable debts.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

A student is writing a research paper on the global rise of the home video game industry during the 1970s and 1980s. The student is surprised by differences in the number of units sold by some systems compared to those sold by others. Most remarkably,the________.

 

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

The mating environment hypothesis predicts that populations of flowering plants compensate for reduced mating opportunities due to dichogamy (a plant's expression of male and female functions at separate times to prevent self-pollination) by adjusting the bias of floral sex allocation during the flowering period, increasing the probability of successful cross-plant pollination. Researchers tested the hypothesis by examining a population of broadleaf arrowhead, a plant for which bloom onset generally takes longer for male flowers than for female flowers, during the flowering season. They concluded that the mating environment hypothesis is not well supported by their observational data.

 

Which choice best describes data from the table that support the researchers'conclusion?

The following text is adapted from William Shakespeare's 1597 play The Tragedy of King Richard III. Richard is reflecting on the recent arrest of his brother, the Duke of Clarence, on suspicion of treason against King Edward IV. Derby, Hastings, Buckingham, Rivers,Dorset, and Grey are also members of the English nobility.

RICHARD: I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl.

The secret mischiefs that I set [flowing]

I lay unto the grievous charge of others.

Clarence, whom I indeed have cast in darkness.

I do beweep to many simple [gullible people],

Namely, to Derby, Hastings, Buckingham;

And tell them 'tis the Queen and her allies

That stir the King against the Duke my brother

Now they believe it, and withal whet me

To be revenged on Rivers, Dorset, Grey.

Which choice best describes what happens in the text?

In what is now southern Florida, the Calusa people (circa 1000-1600 CE) supported their relatively large population's dietary needs with hydrological engineering rather than terrestrial farming methods. They constructed watercourts (gated coastal enclosures) out of shells and sediments to trap a variety of fish as waters rose and fell with tides and seasonal sea-level shifts; watercourt pools then held the fish for later consumption. Archaeologist Theresa Schober has posited an additional purpose of these enclosures,suggesting that they were intended to foster conch. She ties this hypothesis to the high value the sea snails would have had for the Calusa, both nutritionally and as a building material (conch shells are highly durable).

Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken Schober's hypothesis?

As observed in a 2011 study by Emilio Garcia-Robledo and Alfonso Corzo, macroalgal proliferation may have a suppressive effect on the abundance of cyanobacteria and other microphytobenthos (MPB)—chlorophyll-producing microbes inhabiting marine sediment—in part by reducing the amount of sunlight available to MPB. Examining benthic chlorophyll concentrations (a widely used proxy for MPB biomass) in mudflats in Curlew Bay and other coastal sites in Virginia, Alice E. Besterman and Michael L. Pace found that those concentrations did not negatively correlate with macroalgal proliferation. However, they noted that MPB may respond to low-light conditions by producing higher-than-normal concentrations of chlorophyll, and they thus concluded that__________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

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 the Seri people from a small community 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 diethyl disulfide, which smells like garlic. The team's study thus undermined the idea that__________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Although Grant Tavinor concludes that computer games are art by virtue of their forming a subcategory of fiction, and Berys Gaut similarly places them within the realm of cinema,neither approach adequately captures a central aspect of playing these games: when the player no longer attends to the narrative and is instead simply absorbed in the instrumentalities of gameplay. This is among the reasons philosopher C. Thi Nguyen contends that the work of computer-game designers is in what he calls the medium of player agency, which the designer prescribes through rules and goals, and which elicits positive aesthetic experiences in the player who agrees to adopt it. Therefore, Nguyen's position is that Tavinor's and Gaut's frameworks_________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Many studies have found a positive association between levels of dissolved organic carbon and mercury in bodies of fresh water undisturbed by human activity. But Stéphane Guédron, Delphine Tisserand, and colleagues did not find this correlation in an examination of freshwater bodies impacted by wastewater, leading some scientists to hypothesize that the association could be particular to undisturbed waters. However, Ida Tjerngren and colleagues carried out a study on freshwater bodies disturbed by urban development that showed similar results to the studies on undisturbed waters, suggesting that__________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Branching in Jurisprudential Schools 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-Wangari Manuscript Library.

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

The terms included in Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney's Home Ground: A Guide to the American____________such as "karst,"which refers to limestone terrain riddled with caves or sinkholes—illustrate the rich vocabulary used to describe the landforms of North America.

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

Following the formation of the European Union (EU) that same year, the organizers of the 1992 Tour de France wanted the bike race to reflect the cross-national flow of people and trade that the EU had made possible. The resulting course was 2,500 miles long_________seven separate borders of neighboring countries, modeled a vision of the EU's unifying aims.

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

As part of his I GOT UP series, Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara spent over a decade—with near daily consistency—mailing postcards to friends declaring what time he got up each day, resulting in pieces such as I Got Up at 7.19 A.M., Jun 6 1977. Such meticulous documentation of mundane__________artworks that "resonate with existential, psychological and scientific implications about the time-space continuum,"according to the New York Times, became Kawara's life's work.

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

For her film I Am Somebody (1970), a documentary about a successful months-long strike held by Black female hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina, director Madeline Anderson chose a narrator who had participated in the________by allowing the narrative to be shaped by one of their own, amplified the agency and power the workers possessed.

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

John Quincy Adams employed the pseudonym"Marcellus"—a reference to a leader of an ancient Roman army—in political essays he wrote in 1793, a choice that accomplished far more than simply concealing his authorship.__________it wasn't an arbitrary pen name but rather a complex rhetorical strategy through which Adams aligned his political views with the venerated republican ideals of the ancient world, thereby bolstering the authority of his writing.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

In a 2005 study by Mellado et al., the researchers' aim was to analyze the diet composition of cattle in Coahuila, Mexico._________they aimed to analyze the ratio of three different plant subtypes within these animals'diet: graminoids, forbs, and browse.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

At a time when many women writers used male pseudonyms to gain greater freedom of self-expression by evading gender conventions, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper adapted the practice by publishing poetry, prose, and drama for four decades under the shared name Michael Field.__________the duo was able to express the joint creative vision that sustained their long personal and professional partnership.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

· The nautical mile (6,076 feet) is the measure of distance used in seafaring navigation.

· A nautical mile directly correlates to one minute (1/60 th of a degree) of latitude.

· The curvature of Earth affects the accurate measurement of long distances when using flat maps.

· Measuring distances with latitude and longitude coordinates takes into account Earth's curvature.

· Mariners use nautical charts marked with latitude and longitude to quickly calculate distances and positions.

The student wants to explain why nautical miles are used to measure distances in seafaring navigation. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

· Snow hydrologist Julie Koeberle helps maintain automated snow measurement stations.

· They are called SNOTEL sites.

· There are around 90 stations throughout Wyoming.

· One is at Bear Trap Meadow.

· The data collected can help researchers make downstream water supply predictions.

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to provide an example of a SNOTEL site?

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

· Kale is a vegetable that contains ascorbic acid, an essential nutrient for humans.

· Apricots are fruits that contain ascorbic acid.

· There is 120 milligrams (mg) of ascorbic acid per every 100 grams (g) of kale.

· There is 10 mg of ascorbic acid per every 100g of apricot.

· Humans cannot make ascorbic acid in their bodies, so they must get it from foods, including fruits and vegetables.

· Ascorbic acid is also known as vitamin C.

The student wants to refute a claim that apricots are a better source of vitamin C than kale is. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?