SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Novel chemical elements, such as livermorium (Lv), are synthesized through reactions among existing chemical compounds. Ana Martinez notes that while the orderly framework of the periodic table of the elements guides experimental chemists toward viable combinations of such compounds, unstructured exploration can be just as__________: valuable discoveries have been made by chance.

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

Historian Linda Gordon explains that early twentieth-century social reformer Florence Kelley did not merely critique unsafe industrial labor conditions in abstract terms; rather, Kelley compiled ___________ statistical records detailing exact factory temperatures, injury rates, and working hours to force state legislators to enact binding safety regulations.

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

Blue holes, such as Dean's Blue Hole and the Tar Side Blue Hole, are deep sinkholes that form underwater. Because the dark blue appearance of their waters means these pits can be easily _________shallow areas around them, where the water looks light blue, many blue holes have been discovered by people doing recreational activities like boating.

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

The following text is adapted from John Mathew's 1925 short story "Tog."

 

The fog extended its tentacles over city and river, gradually obliterating traces of familiar landscapes. At five thirty the old Panhandle bridge, supported by massive sandstone pillars, stalwart, as when erected fifty years before to serve a generation now passed behind the portals of life, had become a spectral outline against the sky.

 

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

In Azerbaijan, use of solid fuel (e. g., coal, wood) as a share of total household fuel use fell by nearly 90 percent between 2000 and 2019; such shifts are often explained by appeal to the energy ladder, a model holding that fuel choice is mediated mainly by household income (specifically, high-technology fuels displace solid fuels as incomes rise). M. Narasimha Rao and B. Sudhakara Reddy's study of fuel use in India shows this model to be reductive, however: household fuel use was heterogeneous, flexible, and influenced by several factors, including household size.

Which choice best describes the main purpose of the text?

Condemned by colonial officials in Zimbabwe as ruinous to rangelands and forests, goats have often been vilified as agents of environmental degradation. Scrutinizing the putative role of the goat in narratives of ecological decline, researchers Cara Loomis and Carol Kerven suggest that such narratives _________ . Because goats are highly resilient, they often inhabit harsh landscapes that can no longer support other livestock species. As a result, they are frequently condemned for damage wrought over extended periods by other factors like overcultivation and soil erosion.

In context, which choice best completes the main argument presented in the text?

The following text is adapted from George Eliot's 1871-1872 novel Middlemarch. Dorothea Brooke is contemplating the scholarly ambitions of her husband, Edward Casaubon.

 

Dorothea had believed that in marrying Mr. Casaubon she would be helping to construct a monumental edifice of knowledge that would illuminate ancient mythologies for all future ages. Yet day by day, as she sorted through piles of disconnected notes and half-filled notebooks in the dim library, the great work began to look less like an enduring monument than an impenetrable labyrinth leading nowhere. The massive synthesis remained unwritten, existing only in fragmentary outlines that seemed to multiply without advancing toward any definite conclusion.

 

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

Sociologist Matthew Salganik and colleagues conducted an experimental study to examine how social influence affects cultural markets. The researchers created an artificial online music platform where over 14,000 participants could listen to, rate, and download 48 previously unknown songs. In the control condition, participants chose songs based solely on their own evaluations without seeing data on other users' preferences. In the social influence conditions, participants could see real-time download counts reflecting the choices of earlier listeners. Salganik and his team observed that when download counts were visible, popular songs became dramatically more popular while unpopular songs languished, demonstrating that social influence amplifies inequality in market success and makes hit songs largely unpredictable based on intrinsic quality alone.

Based on the text, what did Salganik and colleagues determine about cultural markets where consumers can observe other consumers' choices?

 

Dendroclimatologists analyze radial tree-ring growth to reconstruct historical summer temperature fluctuations caused by volcanic aerosol emissions. Sulfate aerosols injected into the stratosphere reflect incoming solar radiation, cooling high-latitude landmasses and suppressing seasonal wood formation in subarctic trees. A team led by paleoclimatologist Dr. Marcus Thorne examined Siberian larch tree rings across four major volcanic events to determine how long post-eruption cooling persisted. The researchers observed that while the severity of growth reduction varied across events, ___________.

 

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

 

The largest tyrannosaurids—the family of carnivorous dinosaurs that includes Torbosourus, Albertosourus, and, most famously, Tyrannosaurus rex—are thought to have had the strongest bites of any land animals in Earth's history. Determining the bite force of extinct animals can be difficult, however, and paleontologists Paul Barrett and Emily Rayfield have suggested that an estimate of dinosaur bite force may be significantly influenced by the methodology used in generating that estimate.

 

Which choice best describes data from the table that support Barrett and Rayfield's suggestion?

In 1926, young African American writers and artists, including Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, published the single issue of the avant-garde literary journal Fire!!. Literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues that the journal represented an intentional rebellion against the older generation of Harlem Renaissance leaders (such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke), who advocated that Black art should primarily serve as respectable propaganda to demonstrate civic merit to white society.

 

Which quotation from an essay by Wallace Thurman in Fire!! would most directly illustrate the literary historian's argument?

Martinez et al. (2022) analyzed temperature data of Jupiter's upper atmosphere observed in 2018 and 2019. When superimposed on a map of Jupiter, time-lapse data representing several hours of observations from one day in 2018 and one day in 2019 indicate an overall temperature gradient from the poles to the equator, with highest temperatures occurring at the poles, which undergo auroral heating. But the 2019 data exhibit a large oval of unusually elevated temperature separated from the aurora at one pole by a band of cooler atmosphere. No other known heating mechanism on Jupiter could account for the formation of this anomalous structure, so one hypothesis considered was that it was ejected from the auroral region toward the equator.

Which finding about Jupiter's upper atmosphere, if true, would most strongly support the hypothesis as described in the text?

When searching for atmospheric biosignatures on exoplanets, astrobiologists prioritize chemical disequilibria—the simultaneous presence of gases that would rapidly react and destroy each other unless continuously replenished by biological activity. For example, detecting methane (CH₄) in an oxygen-rich (O₂) atmosphere is considered strong evidence of life because photochemical reactions driven by stellar ultraviolet radiation break down methane into water and carbon dioxide within decades. However, planetary modeler Dr.Kevin Zahnle cautions that finding atmospheric methane alone, in the absence of abundant oxygen or ozone, cannot serve as a reliable biosignature because____________.

 

 

Which choice most logically completes the text?

When conducting remote sensing surveys of ancient architectural complexes, archaeological teams must evaluate spatial patterns in multispectral imagery before deciding which excavation trench ______

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

With an average summer temperature of 82.5 degrees Fahrenheit, Nicosia is one European _________ many travelers recommend, especially from June to September.

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

Known in Taiwan for hosting its first televised cooking show, renowned ___________ Fu Pei-mei taught viewers how to cook Chinese cuisine for almost 40 years. Fu gained acclaim outside of Taiwan as well, particularly from the success of her first bilingual Mandarin-English cookbook, published in 1969.

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

Biochemist Jennifer Doudna, along with her French collaborator Emmanuelle __________ the CRISPR-Cas9 microbial adaptive immune system into a programmable genome-editing technology that revolutionized biomedical science.

 

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

 

A recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, ____________ known as femtochemistry when he devised an optical spectroscopy technique that allowed researchers to study ultrafast chemical reactions occurring within molecules.

 

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

 

Engineers often look to biological adaptations in the natural world to resolve complex aerodynamic challenges. ________ when Japanese rail designers redesigned the high-speed Shinkansen 500-Series train to eliminate loud atmospheric sonic booms when exiting tunnels, they modeled the locomotive's elongated nose cone directly after the beak of the kingfisher.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

AI-Andalus, the historical region of the Iberian Peninsula that includes most of modern-day Spain, was ruled by various Arabic-speaking Muslim states between the eighth and fifteenth centuries. ______ many Arabic words, such as "alacrán" —meaning "scorpion"—made their way into the Spanish language.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

D-2 steel, an alloy that contains 1.50% carbon, 0.60% manganese, and 1.10% vanadium, is an air-hardening steel. ______ D-2 steel is properly quenched by heating the steel to 1,850°F and then rapidly cooling it in air to near room temperature, which increases its hardness.

 

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

 

Within a given ecosystem, energy tends to transfer across what ecologists, such as Veronica Andreo, call trophie levels. __________ primary producers, like plants, at the first trophie level provide energy (i.e., food) for herbivores, like mosquito larvae, at the second level; those at the second level provide energy for carnivores and omnivores, like small birds, at the third; and so on, up the food chain.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

 

·Dinosaur fossil specimens can be found at science museums all over the world.

·A dinosaur fossil specimen nicknamed Wyrex is housed at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Houston, Texas.

·Wyrex, a Tyrannosaurus, lived in the Late Cretaceous period.

·A dinosaur fossil specimen nicknamed Pops is housed at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Denver, Colorado.

·Pops, a Triceratops, lived in the Late Cretaceous period.

 

The student wants to emphasize a similarity between the two dinosaur fossil specimens. 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:

 

• Roads designated as National Scenic Byways (NSBs) must have noteworthy features in one of six categories.

• These features can be significant for their scenic, natural, historic, cultural, recreational, or archaeological appeal.

• The Country Music Highway in Kentucky was selected to be an NSB because of the cultural features along its route.

• It provides access to theaters, music festivals, and museums.

• The Illinois River Road in Illinois was selected because of the natural features along its route.

• It provides access to river bluffs, wetlands, and prairies.

 

The student wants to indicate why the two roads were selected to be NSBs. 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:

 

· Merle Oberon (1911-1979) was an actress born in Mumbai (then known as Bombay), India.

· She was of Indian, Maori, and Irish heritage.

· She was the first Indian-born actress to be nominated for an Academy Award.

· Early in her career, she played many nameless, uncredited roles, such as her role in The Three Passions (1928).

· Later, she played many named, credited roles, such as Marjorie Ismay in Forever and a Day (1943).

 

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to specify Merle Oberon's role in Forever and a Day (1943)?

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

 

·The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek hand-powered mechanical device discovered in a shipwreck in 1901.

·Constructed around the late 2nd or early 1st century BCE, it is widely regarded as the world's oldest known analogue computer.

·It used a complex differential gear train comprising over thirty bronze gears to predict astronomical positions and eclipses.

·It tracked the Saros cycle (a 223-lunar-month eclipse prediction cycle) and the Metonic cycle.

·It also included an indicator display showing the four-year cycle of the ancient Panhellenic athletic games (including the Olympic Games).

 

The student wants to emphasize the astronomical predictive capabilities of the Antikythera mechanism. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?