SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Political blogs with conspicuous ideological alignments became an integral component of US media in the early 2000s. While some commentators lauded this development, asserting that such blogs had a welcome transparency missing from traditional news, less_____observers countered that such blogs tended to ideological extremes that exacerbated political polarization to problematic levels.

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

Vertical gene transfer involves the transmission of genetic material from a parent to offspring; horizontal gene transfer, on the other hand, involves the exchange of genetic material between organisms not in a parentoffspring relationship. While horizontal gene transfer is common among prokaryotes-single-celled organisms, such as the bacteria Brevundimonas diminuta and Massilia timonae-it has rarely been observed among eukaryotes (multicellular organisms). However, new studies suggest that horizontal gene transfer is more common in eukaryotes than originally thought.

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

The following text is from George Marion McClellan's 1895 poem "Eternity."
My spirit swoons, and all my senses cry
For Ocean's breast and covering of the sky.
Rock me to sleep, ye waves, and outward bound,
Just let me drift far out from toil and care,
Where lapping of the waves shall be the sound,
Which mingled with the winds that gently bear
Me on between a peaceful sea and sky,
To make my soothing slumberous lullaby.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

Despite stated claims of global relevance, much major research on income inequality performed in the 2010s suffered from a myopic focus on a few countries in North America and Western Europe, partly due to limited data availability. Researchers would later_____this shortcoming after gaining new access to administrative records located in nations in South America, such as Brazil, and Eastern Europe, such as Russia.

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

One popular theory of the origin of the Moon, the "big whack," posits that a protoplanet called Theia collided with Earth, flinging debris into orbit that eventually coalesced into the Moon. Until recently, Theia was_____, but researcher Qian Yuan and colleagues now claim to have identified pieces of the protoplanet in the lowermost section of Earth's mantle.

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

Biologist Grace Herzel and colleagues conducted a study of how butterfly color and weather conditions relate to butterfly behavior, which wouldn't have been possible without data gathered by students and other amateur science enthusiasts in the community. Considering over three years' worth of data, the researchers found that white butterflies were observed on green flowers more often than any other butterflies were, and that butterflies were observed to feed more often on cloudy days than on other days.

According to the text, which factors seemed to be linked to the behavior of butterflies in Grace Herzel and colleagues' study?

Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge is an 1838 historical account by Elleanor Eldridge and Frances Harriet Whipple Green. In the book, the authors describe how restorative sleep can be for young people, writing, ______

Which quotation from Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge most effectively illustrates the claim?

Text 1
In parts of New Zealand, the stoat is a major predator of the house mouse. Researcher G.L. Blackwell and colleagues found that when this predation pressure on house mice was temporarily reduced, their numbers significantly increased. This finding illustrates a foundational ecological  principle: predators control prey population numbers.

Text 2
William D. Gulsby and colleagues found that excluding coyotes from a site in the state of Georgia where they typically prey on white-tailed deer had no significant effect on white-tailed deer abundance. Many other predation relief studies show an increase in prey abundance, but those studies often focus on small, rapidly reproducing prey, like birds, mice, and frogs, rather than large, slowly reproducing prey, like white-tailed deer, which could account for the difference between those results and Gulsby and colleagues' results.

Based on the texts, the author of Text 2 would most likely agree with which statement about the "principle" mentioned in Text 1?

Many artists associated with hyperpop, a movement in electronic music that emerged in the 2010s, conform to the model perfected by the American duo 100 gecs: bold synthesizer arrangements, propulsive beats, and electronically manipulated vocals. Yet the movement is hardly uniform: Swedish recording artist Namasenda incorporates hip-hop rhythms into the hyperpop sound, for example. Such stylistic diversity is encouraged in part by the music-streaming app Spotify, whose curated playlist of hyperpop songs balances cohesion with variety.

Which statement about Namasenda is best supported by the text?

Neuroscientist Kiyohito Iigaya and colleagues developed a computational model to predict how much a person will enjoy a particular work of art on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (very much). They then recruited participants to use the same scale to rate several sets of paintings in various styles and calculated the correlation between the ratings predicted by the model and those reported by the participants. Assuming participant P6 gave equal ratings to the abstract and cubist paintings, the data in the graph indicate the model predicted that_____

Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to complete the example?

Eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith is famed for his metaphor of the invisible hand, which he putatively used to illustrate a robust model of how individuals produce aggregate benefits by pursuing their own economic interests. Note "putatively": as Gavin Kennedy has shown, Smith deploys this metaphor only once in his economic writings-to make a narrow point about the then-dominant economic theory of mercantilism-and it was largely ignored until some twentieth-century economists eager to secure an intellectual pedigree for their views elevated it to a fully-fledged paradigm.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

For its 1974 work Instant Mural, the Chicano art collective Asco taped members Patssi Valdez and Humberto Sandoval to an outdoor wall in East Los Angeles. The work is manifestly a commentary on constraint, but many critics focus on Valdez and the social constraints women faced at the time, which is understandable but leaves the presence of Valdez's male collaborator Sandoval unexplained. We should instead consider that in 1974, the art establishment's recognition of Chicano artists was (and had long been) restricted to sociohistorical muralists, leaving nonmuralist Chicano artists-like Asco's members-struggling to even exhibit their work; attending to this context opens an interpretation that accounts for all the evidence, allowing us to conclude that______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Early Earth is thought to have been characterized by a stagnant lid tectonic regime, in which the upper lithosphere (the outer rocky layer) was essentially immobile and there was no interaction between the lithosphere and the underlying mantle. Researchers investigated the timing of the transition from a stagnant lid regime to a tectonic plate regime, in which the lithosphere is fractured into dynamic plates that in turn allow lithospheric and mantle material to mix. Examining chemical data from lithospheric and mantle-derived rocks ranging from 285 million to 3.8 billion years old, the researchers dated the transition to 3.2 billion years ago.

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

Included in Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, a 2018 group exhibition at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, was the work of artist Lorna Simpson, who is best known for her multimedia artworks that juxtapose images of African American women with text fragments. Her work challenges conventional notions of race, gender, history, and ______ she is credited with expanding the horizons of conceptual photographic art.

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

Recent analysis of 2010 BL4-an outer solar system object orbiting the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune-has determined its color to be gray, suggesting an icy composition. Such interpretations are ultimately ______ the object's gray coloration may be an incidental effect of radiation, solar wind, or collisions with other objects rather than evidence of its physical makeup.

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

Scholars are increasingly exploring the communication and preservation of ecological knowledge through Indigenous songs (e.g., Temiar songs about landforms and landmarks and those of the Tlingit people about wildlife encounters). In one study, ethnobiologist Dana Lepofsky et al. received insight from Kwaxsistalla Wathl'thla, a song keeper for the Kwakwaka'wakw people in Canada, into songs referencing the people's use of terraced gardens in intertidal zones along the Pacific Northwest coast for the cultivation of clams for consumption.
Archaeological evidence of significant increases in clam size and abundance in that area concurrent with the documented past implementation of the method described in the songs supports the conclusion that______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Despite the fact that what is now known as the Carmichael number was first posited by Václav Šimerka, the number is named after the twentiethcentury American mathematician Robert Carmichael. One might assume cases like this, where a discovery or concept is not named after the first person who discovered it, to be______they are counted among a litany of examples of Stigler's law.

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

In the list "Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past" from Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book, the author delights in pressed silk, a moonlit night, and dried hollyhock. So shrewd an observer is Shōnagon, a lady-in-waiting to Empress Teishi, that her book's musings on tenth-century Japanese courtly life______readers a thousand years later.

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

Nadifa Mohamed is a novelist from Hargeisa, Somalia, who has earned international acclaim in recent years. Writers of other literary forms, such as poetry and drama, are less likely to be recognized beyond their nations' borders, but many are still well _____ Koulsy Lamko, for example, is a celebrated playwright from Chad.

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

The prime meridian, the global indicator of zero degrees longitude established in 1884, was originally determined using astronomically derived coordinates. _______ as decades passed, new calculations would reveal increasingly precise coordinates, yet the prime meridian remained unchanged; it wasn't until the 1980s that, spurred by improved geodetic data, the prime meridian was officially moved-roughly one hundred meters east.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The present-day city of Yoshkar-Ola, Russia, was the capital of the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, one of many nominally autonomous republics within the Soviet Union. Each of these republics_______established along ethnolinguistic lines: most residents of the Mari Republic spoke Mari, for example.

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

When, in 2017, Cambridge University students Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow decided they wanted to develop a musical together, one of their goals was for their female actor friends to have good parts to play. _______ they created the show Six, a retelling of the history of King Henry VIII's wives in which each of the six queens has a starring role.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

• Stylistic analysis and biographical analysis are two approaches to art criticism.

• Stylistic analysis examines how an artwork's visual features contribute to its overall style.

• Such an analysis of Claude Monet's Water Lilies might consider how the painting's loose brushwork represents an impressionist style.

• Biographical analysis considers the personal experiences of the artist.

• Such an analysis of Claude Monet's Women in the Garden might consider how the painting's portrayal of a figure holding red and white roses alludes to Monet's romantic difficulties.

The student wants to present biographical analysis to an audience unfamiliar with the concept. 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:

• Francis Halzen is a Belgian particle physicist.

• Particle physicists study subatomic particles.

• Neutrinos are some of the least understood subatomic particles.

• Neutrinos were first discovered in the mid-twentieth century.

• Halzen is known for his discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos.

The student wants to provide an example of a particle physicist whose research focuses on neutrinos. 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:

· A river's stream length is the length of a line that follows along the river path.

· A river's valley length is the length of a straight line drawn from the beginning of the river to the end.

· The river's curviness, or sinuosity, is the ratio of the river's stream length to its valley length.

· Low-sinuosity rivers have a stream length 1-1.5 times longer than their valley length, and high-sinuosity rivers have a stream length 5 or more times longer than their valley length.

· The Embarras River in Canada has high sinuosity.

· The Luni River in India has low sinuosity.

The student wants to compare the curviness of the two rivers. 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:

• Use the Future is a 1992 sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci.

• It consists of a yellow neon sign that spells out the title phrase.

• Ginger is a 2023 sculpture by Japanese artist Rikako Kawauchi.

• It consists of a pink neon sign that forms an abstract squiggle shape.

• Neon signs became popular with advertisers in the 1920 s and began to decline in popularity in the 1960s.

• Neon signs became popular with artists in the 1960 s and continue to be popular today.

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