SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Any effort to raise the toll that drivers must pay to use the Ogdensburg-Prescott Bridge, which spans the Saint Lawrence River to connect New York State and Ontario, Canada, should explain why a higher toll is necessary; no amount of justification, however, is likely to persuade some drivers who believe the current toll is__________.

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

Although the cumulative weight of the goods in a cargo truck affects fuel efficiency, this effect—and the corresponding effect on the cost of a given trip to the trucking company—is relatively small. The large majority of a trip's cost stems from the mere fact of the truck being on the road; accordingly, trucking firms are__________ to dispatch trucks that aren't full.

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

While higaki (cypress fence) and other traditional sashiko patterns are visually striking, the repeated stitches in this needlework technique also__________textiles with resilience. Developed in the Edo period (1603-1868) in Japan to mend clothing and domestic textiles, sashiko uses tightly spaced rows of stitching to beautify and reinforce worn cloth.

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

In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced the "private language argument," challenging the Cartesian assumption that language gains its meaning from internal, subjective mental sensations. Wittgenstein posited that for an individual to follow a rule regarding the naming of a private sensation, there must be a criterion for distinguishing between actually following the rule and merely believing one is following it. Because a solitary speaker isolated from a community of language users possesses no independent standard of correctness, the notion of a purely private language is inherently self-undermining; meaning is fundamentally grounded in communal customs and public social practice ("forms of life").

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Epigenetic mechanisms modulate gene expression without altering the underlying DNA nucleotide sequence. Among these, DNA methylation typically represses transcription by obstructing the binding of transcriptional machinery or recruiting chromatin-remodeling proteins. However, recent genomic mapping in mammalian neurons reveals that DNA methylation within gene bodies (intragenic regions), rather than at promoter regions, frequently correlates with elevated transcriptional activity. Neuroscientist Dr. Aris Thorne notes that this intragenic methylation prevents aberrant transcription initiation from cryptic internal sites, thereby preserving the fidelity of full-length transcript synthesis during intensive neural signaling.

Which choice best states the primary purpose of the text?

High-reward flowers that produce nectar with relatively high sugar concentrations are thought to be especially attractive to green hermits and other hummingbird species. But when Ana M. Torres and team monitored hummingbird visits to flowering plants, including Passiflora vitifolia, at Pipeline Road and other sites in Panama, they found that visit frequencies weren't influenced by nectar traits. Rather, physical compatibility of flower corollas (collections of petals) and hummingbird bills more strongly predicted hummingbird-plant interaction patterns.

Which statement about hummingbird preferences is most strongly supported by the text?

In an investigation of spatial cognition, neuroscientist Edvard Moser and colleagues examined how mammals maintain internal maps of physical environments. The team recorded the electrical activity of specialized neurons—known as grid cells—in the medial entorhinal cortex of rodents navigating open enclosures. The firing fields of individual grid cells formed remarkably regular, periodic triangular lattices spanning the entire available area, closely matching mathematical models of hexagonal close-packing. This spatial periodicity indicated to the researchers that the entorhinal cortex generates an intrinsic, metric coordinate system capable of computing distance and trajectory independently of external visual landmarks.

 

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

 

Text 1

Traditional economic welfare models rely heavily on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita as a proxy for social progress. These metrics operate on the assumption that material abundance and utility maximization accurately reflect societal flourishing. By aggregating market transactions into a single monetary figure, policymakers can efficiently benchmark productivity gains and calibrate macroeconomic interventions across divergent national contexts.

 

 

Text 2

Economist Amartya Sen argues that evaluating human development purely through monetary income conflates the instruments of well-being with well-being itself. Under Sen's "capabilities approach," societal progress must be evaluated based on people's substantive freedoms to achieve valuable functionings—such as literacy, physical health, and political participation. Two nations with identical GDP per capita may diverge drastically in their citizens' actual capabilities if public health infrastructure and educational access are unequally distributed.

 

Based on the texts, how would Amartya Sen (Text 2) most likely evaluate the core assumption of the traditional welfare models described in Text 1?

 

Leguminous plants establish symbiotic relationships with soil bacteria known as rhizobia, which convert atmospheric dinitrogen (N₂) into biologically accessible ammonia. Because the enzymatic reduction of nitrogen requires high cellular energy investments in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), soil phosphorus availability often limits this process. Plant ecologist Dr. Elena Vasquez measured nitrogen fixation rates in soybean plants cultivated under three distinct soil phosphorus concentrations: low (5mg/kg), moderate (20mg/kg), and high (50mg/kg). Vasquez concluded that biological nitrogen fixation scales directly with increasing phosphorus availability.

 

Which choice best describes data from the graph that support Dr. Vasquez's conclusion?

 

Silica cements associated with casts of soft-bodied marine organisms from the Ediacaran period (circa 538-635 million years ago) are plausibly attributable to one of two phenomena: rapid postmortem preservation of the organisms via precipitation of cements from silica-rich oceans or cement precipitation via high-pressure reactions long after the organisms were preserved by some other means. Recognizing that such reactions generally result in cements with germanium/silicon (Ge/Si) ratios lower than those of silica grains recovered from the same portion of sandstone, Lidya Tarhan et al. investigated silica cements and grains associated with Ediacaran soft-bodied casts at a site in Australia.

 

Based on the information in the text and the graph, Tarhan et al. could most reasonably draw which conclusion?

 

Claudine at School is a 1900 novel by Colette, originally written in French. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old girl living in a small, rural town. She presents herself as having a strong emotional attachment to the surrounding forests:_________.

Which quotation from a translation of Claudine at School most effectively illustrates the claim?

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) communicate using low-frequency acoustic vocalizations known as "rumbles," which can propagate through savannah environments across several kilometers. Behavioral ecologist Karen McComb and colleagues recorded elephant rumbles and tested how listeners distinguish familiar herd members from unfamiliar conspecifics. While earlier models assumed that low-frequency fundamental tones below 20Hz (infrasound) carry individual vocal signatures over maximum distances, McComb discovered that acoustic recognition of specific herd members degrades sinificantly at distances exceeding 1.5 kilometers, because higher-frequency vocal tract resonances (formants) around 115Hz attenuate and become obscured by ambient environmental noise. McComb therefore concluded that _________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft revealed that Saturn's icy moon Enceladus expels active plumes of water vapor and ice grains through fractures in its south polar crust, fed by a subsurface liquid ocean. While previous flybys detected water, carbondioxide, methane, and ammonia within the plumes, planetary scientists remained uncertain whether the ocean contained soluble phosphorus, a critical element required for DNA, RNA, and cellular ATP synthesis. In a 2023 study, geochemist Frank Postberg and colleagues analyzed high-resolution spectra of ice grains captured by Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyzer and identified abundant sodium phosphate salts. Because phosphorus concentrations in Enceladus's ocean water were calculated to be at least 100 times higher than those in Earth's oceans, the researchers suggest that ________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Phylogenomic analyses of the Asgard archaea—a group of uncultivated microbes discovered near deep-sea hydrothermal vents—have transformed evolutionary models of eukaryogenesis (the emergence of complex eukaryotic cells). Asgard genomes encode numerous "eukaryotic signature proteins" (ESPs) involved in membrane trafficking, ubiquitin mediated protein degradation, and cytoskeletal dynamics, functions previously thought to be exclusive to eukaryotes. Evolutionary biologist Dr. Thijs Ettema argues that these genomic discoveries support the "two-domain" tree of life, in which eukaryotes did not branch off as an independent third lineage alongside Archaea and Bacteria, but rather_________.

 

Which choice most logically completes the text?

 

Represented most commonly by a double vertical bar (||) or double oblique lines (//), ______ function as a deliberate break in the flow of poetry or music.

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

With its perfect quadrilateral symmetry, the charbagh, an ancient Persian and Indo-Persian creation, represents one of garden design's most sophisticated approaches to spatial ________ rooftop garden at Toronto's Aga Khan Museum being one, this mathematical precision still guides the arrangement of both planted spaces and architectural elements, creating a sanctuary where greenery, stone pathways, and flowing water maintain aesthetic balance.

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

The Balkan nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have one president but ______ as members of the of lice of the presidency, one representing the nation's Bosniaks, one its Serbs, and one its Croats, these elected officials take turns serving as the office's chairperson.

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

By extracting and sequencing ancient environmental DNA preserved within Greenland's Kap Kobenhavn Formation, __________ a two-million-year-old subarctic ecosystem inhabited by mastodons, poplar trees, and Atlantic horseshoe crabs.

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

In high-pressure physics, metallic hydrogen remains one of the most elusive condensed matter phases _________ theorists predict that at pressures exceeding 400 gigapascals, molecular hydrogen will dissociate into a dense lattice of atomic nuclei exhibiting room-temperature superconductivity.

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

Early neurobiologists theorized that the adult mammalian central nervous system was entirely post-mitotic and incapable of generating new functional neurons. __________ in the late 1990s, researchers utilizing bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) pulse-chase labeling demonstrated active adult neurogenesis within the subgranular zone of the human dentate gyrus.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Standard silicon solar cells are physically constrained by the Shockley-Queisser limit, which caps the maximum theoretical energy conversion efficiency of a single p-n junction at approximately 33%. __________ to bypass this thermodynamic constraint, photovoltaic engineers are fabricating tandem multi-junction cells that stack semiconductor layers with different Dandgaps to absorb a broader spectrum of solar radiation.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

A team of ornithologists documented patterns of conspecific brood parasitism among wood ducks (Aix sponsa) in California. The researchers observed several female wood ducks visiting dozens of nesting sites and laying eggs to be incubated by other nesting A. sponsa. Subject 7F64B, __________ visited a select few nesting sites before laying and incubating her eggs herself.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Tardigrades are microscopic invertebrates celebrated for their ability to survive lethal extremes of temperature, radiation, and dehydration by entering a dormant state known as anhydrobiosis, In this desiccation-tolerant state, the animals suspend all metabolic processes and synthesize specialized disordered proteins to protect cellular membranes. When rehydrated, _______ tardigrades resume active cellular respiration and locomotion within several hours.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

 

·Documentary TV programs in the slow TV genre consist of uninterrupted broadcasts of ordinary events in real time.

·The Ghan is an Australian slow TV program.

·The 3-hour-long program documented a 3,000-kilometer train ride across the continent of Australia.

·It first aired in 2017.

·Slow TV has been called "the world's most boring television.

·American journalist Nathan Heller praises it, writing that "it affords a visceral kind of armchair tourism."

 

 

The student wants to use a quotation to refute the claim that slow TV programs are boring. 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:

 

·In 1977, NASA launched the twin probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to explore the outer solar system.

·Both spacecraft took advantage of a rare planetary alignment to conduct flybys of Jupiter and Saturn.

·Voyager 2 continued onward to complete the first flybys of Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).

·In 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space.

·In 2018, Voyager 2 also crossed into interstellar space.

·Both probes continue to transmit scientific telemetry back to Earth using the Deep Space Network.

 

 

The student wants to provide a chronological overview of the Voyager mission's primary exploration milestones. 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:

 

·Jamal Lewis and Jim Brown had historic careers as running backs in the National Football League(NFL).

·The running back position entails running, or rushing, down the field with the football to gain yards for the team.

·Jamal Lewis gained a total of 10,607 rushing yards in his career.

·He played for the Baltimore Ravens and the Cleveland Browns.

·Jim Brown gained a total of 12,312 rushing yards in his career.

·He played for the Cleveland Browns.

 

 

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to begin a narrative about one of the athletes?