SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Whether the reign of a French monarch such as Hugh Capet or Henry I was historically consequential or relatively uneventful, its trajectory was shaped by questions of legitimacy and therefore cannot be understood without a corollary understanding of the factors that allowed the monarch to__________his right to hold the throne.

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

In studying the use of external stimuli to reduce the itching sensation caused by an allergic histamine response, Louise Ward and colleagues found that while harmless applications of vibration or warming can provide a temporary distraction, such___________stimuli actually offer less relief than a stimulus that seems less benign, like a mild electric shock.

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

New and interesting research conducted by Suleiman A. Al-Sweedan and Moath Alhaj is inspired by their observation that though there have been many studies of the effect of high altitude on blood chemistry, there is a__________studies of the effect on blood chemistry of living in locations below sea level, such as the California towns of Salton City and Seeley.

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

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?

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?

A number of Indigenous politicians have been elected to the United States Congress since 2000 as members of the country's two established political parties. In Canada and several Latin American countries, on the other hand, Indigenous people have formed their own political parties to advance candidates who will advocate for the interests of their communities. This movement has been particularly successful in Ecuador, where Guadalupe Llori, a member of the Indigenous party known as Pachakutik, was elected president of the National Assembly in 2021.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

According to Indian economist and sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968), the Eurocentric concepts that informed early twentieth-century social scientific methods—for example, the idea that all social relations are reducible to struggles between individuals—had little relevance for India. Making the social sciences more responsive to Indians' needs, Mukerjee argued, required constructing analytical categories informed by India's cultural and ecological circumstances. Mukerjee thus proposed the communalist "Indian village" as the ideal model on which to base Indian economic and social policy.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

The following text is adapted from Maria Cristina Mena's 1914 short story "The Vine-Leaf."

It is a saying in the capital of Mexico that Dr. Malsufrido carries more family secrets under his hat than any archbishop. The doctor's hat is, appropriately enough, uncommonly capacious, rising very high, and sinking so low that it seems to be supported by his ears and eyebrows, and it has a furry look, as if it had been brushed the wrong way, which is perhaps what happens to it if it is ever brushed at all. When the doctor takes it off, the family secrets do not fly out like a flock of parrots, but remain nicely bottled up beneath a dome of old and highly polished ivory.

Based on the text, how do people in the capital of Mexico most likely regard Dr. Malsufrido?

Starting one's own business, known as entrepreneurship, has become more popular than ever, but a third of new businesses do not survive their first two years. Many entrepreneurs, trying to rebound from that failure, will seek to reenter the workforce. A business management research team conducted a study to determine the impact that a failed business has on a hiring decision. The researchers polled 700 hiring managers from large companies and their findings revealed that__________

 

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

The following text is adapted from Countee Cullen's 1926 poem "Thoughts in a Zoo."

They in their cruel traps, and we in ours,

Survey each other's rage, and pass the hours

Commiserating each the other's woe,

To mitigate his own pain's fiery glow.

Man could but little proffer in exchange

Save that his cages have a larger range.

That lion with his lordly, untamed heart

Has in some man his human counterpart,

Some lofty soul in dreams and visions wrapped,

But in the stifling flesh securely trapped.

Based on the text, what challenge do humans sometimes experience?

Mosasaurs were large marine reptiles that lived in the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 100 million to 66 million years ago. Celina Suarez, Alberto Pérez-Huerta, and T. Lynn Harrell Jr. examined oxygen-18 isotopes in mosasaur tooth enamel in order to calculate likely mosasaur body temperatures and determined that mosasaurs were endothermic—that is, they used internal metabolic processes to maintain a stable body temperature in a variety of ambient temperatures. Suarez, Pérez-Huerta, and Harrell claim that endothermy would have enabled mosasaurs to include relatively cold polar waters in their range.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support Suarez, Pérez-Huerta, and Harrell's claim?

In Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park, an almost imperceptible smile from potential suitor Henry Crawford causes the protagonist Fanny Price to blush; her embarrassment grows when she suspects that he is aware of it. This moment—in which Fanny not only infers Henry's mental state through his gestures, but also infers that he is drawing inferences about her mental state—illustrates what literary scholar George Butte calls "deep intersubjectivity," a technique for representing interactions between consciousnesses through which Austen's novels derive much of their social and psychological drama.

 

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

In 1534 CE, King Henry VIII of England split with the Catholic Church and declared himself head of the Church of England, in part because Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Two years later, Henry VIII introduced a policy titled the Dissolution of the Monasteries that by 1540 had resulted in the closure of all Catholic monasteries in England and the confiscation of their estates. Some historians assert that the enactment of the policy was primarily motivated by perceived financial opportunities.

Which quotation from a scholarly article best supports the assertion of the historians mentioned in the text?

Researcher Lin Zhi developed a process for increasing the tensile strength—measured in gigapascals, or GPa—of silkworm________dissolving and reweaving the silk in a solution of iron metal ions, zinc, and sugar, Zhi increased the amount of force required to stretch it from approximately 0.5 GPa to 2 GPa.

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

In 2018, a team of researchers led by Dr. Caitlin Whalen compiled every available measurement of ocean mixing rates from the past two decades. With this novel data set, the team was able to determine how current-driven mixing varies across_________and what impact it has on the distribution of heat and nutrients in the ocean.

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

The artistic talents of Barbara Chase-Riboud, most known for her 1979 historical novel Sally Hemings and the conversation it inspired,________limited to the realm of prose: she first excelled in sculpture, where her affinity for bronze—a material she described as "timeless" due to its use across eras and cultures—became part of her artistic identity.

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

Working from an earlier discovery of Charpentier's, chemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna—winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—re-created and then reprogrammed the so-called "genetic scissors" of a species of DNA-cleaving bacteria_________a tool that is revolutionizing the field of gene technology.

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

When they were first discovered in Australia in 1798, duck-billed, beaver-tailed platypuses so defied categorization that one scientist assigned them the name Ornithorhynchus paradoxus: "paradoxical bird-snout." The animal, which lays eggs but also nurses_________young with milk, has since been classified as belonging to the monotremes group.

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

On sunny days, dark rooftops absorb solar energy and convert it to unwanted heat, raising the surrounding air________a light-colored covering to an existing dark roof, either by attaching prefabricated reflective sheets or spraying on a paint-like coating, helps combat this effect.

 

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

"Tulip mania"—the rapid rise and sudden fall of the price of tulip bulbs in seventeenth century Amsterdam—is often cited as an example of the perils of rampant market speculation. However, recent research has demonstrated that the episode was neither as frenzied nor as disastrous as has been thought. The popular myth surrounding it,_________should be regarded with some skepticism.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

A 2017 study of sign language learners tested the role of iconicity—the similarity of a sign to the thing it represents—in language acquisition. The study found that the greater the iconicity of a sign, the more likely it was to have been learned.__________the correlation between acquisition and iconicity was lower than that between acquisition and another factor studied: sign frequency.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Historically, most conductors of major orchestras and opera companies have been European men, but a new, more diverse generation of artists is stepping up to the podium. Mexico's Alondra de la Parra took over as conductor for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in 2017,_________and Colombia's Lina Gonzalez-Granados did the same for the Los Angeles Opera in 2022.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The word "orange" comes from the fruit and not the color of the fruit, as the English word comes from the Sanskrit word "Naranga," which is that language's name for the tree that bears oranges. In fact, the earliest known use of orange as a color occurred in 1502.__________English speakers would describe the color as "yellow-red" or say it was the same color as the spice saffron.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

___________its small size, only 25,300 square miles, the island of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean has the most waterfalls of any country in the world, with a recorded 382 waterfalls active during the monsoon season.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

·In 1971, experimental musician Pauline Oliveros created Sonic Meditations.

·Sonic Meditations is not music but rather a series of sound-based exercises called meditations.

·Each meditation consists of instructions for participants to make, imagine, listen to, or remember sounds.

·The instructions for Meditation V state, "walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears."

·Those for Meditation XVIII state, "listen to a sound until you no longer recognize it."

The student wants to provide an explanation and an example of Oliveros's Sonic Meditations. 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:

·Some powerful works of literature have so influenced readers that new legislation has been passed as a result.

·The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) is the autobiography of a man who endured slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.

·Equiano's book contributed to the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.

·The Jungle (1906) is a fictional work by Upton Sinclair that describes unsanitary conditions in US meatpacking plants.

·Sinclair's book contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

The student wants to emphasize a difference between the two books. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?