SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

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?

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 banking records located in nations in Asia, such as China, and Eastern Europe, such as Hungary.

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

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?

During Rome's republican period, which ended in the first century BCE, libraries were predominantly owned by wealthy individuals who tightly controlled access to their book collections. The first public library became available in Rome in 28 BCE and was soon followed by one commissioned by Emperor Augustus. As modern scholar Fabio Fernandes notes, however, these two traditions aren't as distinct as they seem, as both the emperor and the private library owners viewed their libraries as extensions of their personal patronage, just on vastly differing scales.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

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 the Northwest Territories, Canada, the rough-legged hawk is a major predator of the collared lemming. Researcher Alice Kenney and colleagues found that when this predation pressure on collared lemmings was temporarily reduced, their numbers significantly increased. This finding illustrates a foundational ecological  principle: predators control prey population numbers.

Text 2
Robert D. Hayes and colleagues found that excluding wolves from a site in Yukon, Canada, where they typically prey on Dall sheep had no significant effect on Dall sheep abundance. Many other predation relief studies show an increase in prey abundance, but those studies often focus on small, rapidly reproducing prey, like birds, lemmings, and rabbits, rather than large, slowly reproducing prey, like Dall sheep, which could account for the difference between those results and Hayes 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 American musician Laura Les: bold synthesizer arrangements, propulsive beats, and electronically manipulated vocals. Yet the movement is hardly uniform: Venezuelan recording artist Arca incorporates Latin 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 Arca is best supported by the text?

Scholars are increasingly exploring the communication and preservation of ecological knowledge through Indigenous songs (e.g., Kazakh songs about water and foraging quality and those of the O'odham people about desert plants). 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?

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?

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 membersstruggling 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?

Included in Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, a 2019 group exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, California, 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?

Neuroscientist Kiyohito ligaya 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?

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?

In the list "Splendid Things" from Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book, the author delights in grapecolored fabric, wisteria vines around a tree, and a snow-covered garden. So shrewd an observer is Shonagon, 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?

Despite the fact that what is now known as the Cassegrain reflector was first constructed by Bonaventura Cavalieri, the telescope is named after the seventeenth-century French astronomer Laurent Cassegrain. 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?

Moussa Ould Ebnou is a novelist from Boutilimit, Mauritania, 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 Dushanbe, Tajikistan, was the capital of the Tajik 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 Tajik Republic spoke Persian, 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:

• A supercontinent is a single landmass made up of most or all of Earth's continents.

• Over time, continents merge together to form supercontinents, which then break apart.

• This process is believed to take hundreds of millions of years and is known as the supercontinent cycle.

• Ur was a supercontinent that formed about 3.1 billion years ago.

• Columbia was a supercontinent that formed about 1.8 billion years ago.

The student wants to emphasize the order in which the supercontinents were formed. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

• Minor planets are astronomical objects that orbit the Sun but are neither planets nor comets.

• Astronomer Jane Luu has discovered many minor planets in her career.

• Alongside colleagues David C. Jewitt and Chadwick Trujillo, she discovered the minor planet (19308) 1996 TO66 on October 12, 1996.

• Alongside colleagues David C. Jewitt, Chadwick Trujillo, and David J. Tholen, she discovered the minor planet (24978) 1998 HJ151 on April 28, 1998.

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to emphasize the discovery of (19308) 1996 TO66 to an audience already familiar with Jane Luu?

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

• Catharsis, Conversion, Traumata is a 1986 sculpture by American artist Joseph Kosuth.

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

• Harvest Moon is a 2013 sculpture by British/Pakistani artist Shezad Dawood.

• It consists of a yellow neon sign that forms an abstract moon shape.

• Neon signs became popular with advertisers in the 1920s 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?

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

• Pattern analysis and contextual analysis are two approaches to art criticism.

• Pattern analysis examines the repetition of visual elements in an artwork.

• Such an analysis of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans might consider how the painting's repetition of images of soup cans emphasizes the excesses of consumer culture.

• Contextual analysis considers the historical and cultural contexts of an artwork's time.

• Such an analysis of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon might consider how the painting's portrayal of fragmented human figures challenged conventions of beauty during a time of cultural upheaval (early twentieth century).

The student wants to present contextual 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:

• 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 length5 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:

• Samoil M. Bilenky is a Russian 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.

• Bilenky is known for his research on neutrino oscillations.

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?