SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

The 2023 anthology The Big Book of Cyberpunk contains 108 stories, including Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction" (1950) and Erica Satifka's "Act of Providence" (2021). With its chronological scope, it is more comprehensive than the much shorter 1986 cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades, but Mirrorshades's careful selection of stories makes that anthology more__________.

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

In New Zealand, France, and other countries with strong democratic institutions, the state tends to exert relatively little direct control over economic performance. Though this may seem to_________the state's ability to curb inflation, Raj Desai et al. have shown that strongly democratic states can and do deploy effective counterinflationary policies.

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

Although the clustering of cutlery manufacturing firms in Sheffield, UK, is often cited as typical of industrial agglomeration, Giulia Faggio et al. use UK data to show that the mix of factors driving the phenomenon is__________across industries: while access to specialized suppliers can prompt agglomeration, collocation among refined petroleum product manufacturers occurs for different reasons.

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

Studying wrappers from discontinued candies, cover images from out-of-print magazines, and posters promoting concerts by long-forgotten musicians may seem like a frivolous pursuit, but ephemeral objects like these are useful as_________cultural change, revealing 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?

Text 1

In separate studies, Marine Fernandez and colleagues and Xinhua He and colleagues examined whether plants transfer nutrients to one another using a common mycorrhizal network (CMN)—a lattice of fungal strands in the soil. Fernandez and colleagues excluded all pathways other than the CMN by using barriers to keep the plants' root systems separate while allowing mycorrhizal strands through—a crucial step He and colleagues' study did not take.

Text 2

Fernandez and colleagues took the necessary precaution of separating the plants' root systems (thereby excluding root-to-root transmission). However, any barrier used must allow the thread-like hyphae of a CMN to pass through, and this permeability would also allow liquids through. Thus, the researchers' experimental design cannot ensure that any nutrient transfer observed can be attributed to a CMN and not to some other pathway.

Based on the texts, which choice best describes a similarity in the points of view presented in Text 1 and Text 2?

Founded in 1996, the Museum of Latin American Art showcases modern and contemporary art by Latin American artists and Latino artists in the United States. It is located in Long Beach, California, and has more than 1,300 objects in its collection. Since 2000, a number of other institutions devoted to Latino cultures have opened in the United States. A notable example is LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles. It focuses on Mexican American art and culture.

Which choice best states the main topic of the text?

The following text is from William Carlos Williams's 1925 creative nonfiction book In the American Grain. Williams is discussing how works by nineteenth-century US poet and fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe were received by American readers.

Poe must suffer by his originality. Invent that which is new, even if it be made of pine from your own yard, and there's none to know what you have done. It is because there's no name. This is the cause of Poe's lack of recognition. He was American. He was the astounding, inconceivable growth of his locality.

 

As used in the text, what does the underlined figurative phrase most nearly mean?

In Tunica, an Indigenous language from the lower Mississippi Valley in what is now the United States, mili means "red," whereas milimilita is used to refer to several red things. This phenomenon, in which an element of a root word is repeated, sometimes with modification, within another word that is related to the root word, is called reduplication. In this case, the entire word mili gets repeated in milimilita. There are many examples of this type of reduplication in Tunica.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Interested in how differences in the color of dogs' irises affect human responses to dogs, Akitsugu Konno et al. showed close-up images of dogs' faces to human participants and asked them to rate the dogs' traits and their own attitudes toward the dogs. Konno et al. suggest that differences in iris color led participants to view some dogs as more vulnerable and in need of protection than others and that this phenomenon could help explain the association the researchers observed between iris color and participants' inclinations to interact with or keep dogs, as illustrated by the finding that____________

 

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

To measure changes in parasite abundance over time, Chelsea Wood and colleagues counted parasite individuals preserved on specimens of striped sea perch, surf smelt, and six other fish species collected from Puget Sound between 1880 and 2019. Using statistical models to estimate historical populations, the researchers determined that for every 1℃ increase in annual average sea surface temperature, the abundance of complex life cycle parasites like Lecithaster sp. that require at least three unique host species throughout their life cycle decreased by 38%. However, the abundance of Bomolochus bellones and other directly transmitted parasites, which require only one host species, was essentially unchanged. These findings suggest that_________

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Anthropogenic noise (sounds from human sources like traffic or mining) can affect animals, as Soledad Lucía Uran and colleagues found in a 2012 study of brown rats. A meta-analysis of more than 100 such studies examining various species found that, for every study, relevant traits or behaviors of the animals were observably different between the exposed group and the otherwise similar but unexposed group, regardless of whether that difference was beneficial or detrimental for the exposed group. So while a study of birds might show a difference that benefits the exposed group, and a study of mammals might show a difference that's harmful to the exposed group, both differences are substantial. Therefore, the results of the meta-analysis suggest that_________

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Nautilids are marine mollusks that begin growing their shells before emerging from their eggs and continue to add shell segments throughout their lifetimes. The walls between their shells' chambers are called septa, and the deeper the water in which a septum forms, the greater the concentration of the isotope oxygen-18 the septum will contain. Since temperature falls as depth increases, if the area of ocean a nautilid inhabits is known, this isotopic signature can reveal the temperature at which its septa formed. Paleontologist Amane Tajika and colleagues examined each of the septa in two nautilid shells and concluded that septum sample M20 formed at a temperature of 15.2℃ whereas sample F04 formed at 22.5℃.

Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken the researchers' conclusion?

The Truelove, first published in 1992, is a novel in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, which includes twenty books plus an unfinished fragment of a twenty-first. Some critics have found fault with the abrupt endings of The Truelove and other books in the series, saying that they do not finish conclusively but arbitrarily stop. But other critics argue that the books should not be thought of as discrete texts with traditional beginnings and endings but as a single incredibly long work, similar to other multivolume stories, such as Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.

 

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

Argyroxiphium caliginis is among the twenty-eight species of silversword plants found only on the Hawaiian archipelago that collectively illustrate the process of adaptive radiation, or the rapid diversification of an ancestral species into different, related species. Each silversword species is physically distinct, with mature plant forms ranging from trees and shrubs to vines. However, they all descended from a common tarweed plant species, with their unique physical characteristics emerging as they adapted to the archipelago's many specific habitats over time.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

The bird species Piculus flavigula (the yellow-throated woodpecker), which forages in relatively dense vegetation, and Willisornis poecilinotus (the common scale-backed antbird), which forages in open areas or low density vegetation, share territory in French Guiana with Thamnomanes caesius (the cinereous antshrike), which emits a loud alarm call when it detects predators. Biologist Ari Martínez and colleagues, who studied the ecological community the species share, hypothesized that there is an inverse relationship between birds' field of vision while foraging and their sensitivity to alarm calls from neighboring species.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support Martínez and colleagues' hypothesis?

All member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO—including Belgium, which joined in 1949; Hungary, which joined in 1999; and Slovenia, which joined in__________are committed to NATO's principle of collective defense, each member pledging to defend all others.

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

As the exoplanet 81 Ceti b orbits a star 330 light-years from Earth, the exoplanet's gravity causes the star to wobble. In 2008, astronomers___________this wobble through shifts in the color of the star's spectral light—blueshifts indicating longer wavelengths and movement toward the observer, redshifts shorter wavelengths and movement away—and deduced that the fluctuation was caused by the gravitational force of a previously undetected exoplanet.

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

The historian's books about Millard Fillmore__________what she is best known for, but she is also well regarded for her scholarship on Thomas Jefferson.

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

Disyllabic words________as trochees in English metrical verse, such as "eyebrow" and "mascot," consist of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable.

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

A loose confederation of cities from eleven modern-day countries, the Hanseatic League was a powerful mercantile alliance that dominated northern European trade between the 13th and 17th centuries. Hanseatic League member________was serendipitously located on the Rhine River in Germany, giving Cologne's merchants access to key maritime trade routes.

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

Many paintings of the trompe l'oeil genre attain their illusory verisimilitude by depicting quotidian things, such as a fly or an empty bird cage, as if they are placed directly on top of the painted canvas. Nicola van Houbraken's 1700 trompe l'oeil Portrait of François Rivière,_________startles the viewer with the extraordinary sight of a man appearing to poke his head out from within the picture frame.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Scientists studying asteroid deflection have focused on secondary objects such as S/2015 (190208), a moonlet orbiting the near-Earth asteroid 2006 AQ. In 2022 NASA intentionally crashed a probe into just such an object, successfully altering its orbit. Scientists have yet to demonstrate,_________that 2006 AQ and other primary objects would be similarly affected.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The moon Dia orbits Jupiter in the same direction that the planet rotates.__________Dia's orbit is described as prograde. Erinome, another of Jupiter's moons, orbits in the opposite direction, so its orbit is described with the opposite term: retrograde.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

·Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the city of Timbuktu was part of the Songhai Empire.

·Timbuktu was a center of trade and scholarship in the Sahara desert.

·The city was known for its hundreds of thousands of written manuscripts on both secular and religious subjects.

·The manuscripts survive today in dozens of private libraries across the city.

·The Pearls Leading to Accepted Guidance is one of these manuscripts.

The student wants to introduce The Pearls Leading to Accepted Guidance to an audience unfamiliar with the Timbuktu manuscripts' history. 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:

·Katrin Heer, Larissa Albrecht, and Elisabeth K.V. Kalko published a study in 2010.

·In it, the researchers found that ingestion by bats had a neutral effect on the germination of Ficus nymphaeifolia plant seeds.

·Mikaela Marques Pulzatto and M.S. Dainez Filho published a study in 2017.

·In it, the researchers found that ingestion by bats had a negative effect on the germination of Ficus luschnathiana plant seeds.

·Reinaldo Chaves Teixeira, C. Corrêa, and E. Fischer published a study in 2009.

·In it, the researchers found that ingestion by bats had a positive effect on the germination of Ficus pertusa plant seeds.

The student wants to make a generalization about the germination of seeds ingested by bats. 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:

·Waiting is a 1987 black-and-white linocut print by Kuwaiti artist Thuraya Al-Baqsami.

·It depicts a tranquil, everyday scene (a woman in a headscarf gazing out a window).

·¡Sera toda nuestra! ("It will all be ours!") is a 1977 color linocut print by Mexican American artist Carlos Cortéz.

·It features a scene with an explicitly political point of view (a group of laborers preparing to go on strike).

·Lino cutting is an inexpensive printmaking technique in which an image is carved onto linoleum tile, covered in ink or paint, and stamped onto paper.

The student wants to make a generalization about linocut prints. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?