SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Stars form in cloudlike swirls of gas and dust that cannot be touched, but astrophysicist Nia Imara believes these formations need not remain completely ____ to researchers: she uses simulation data and sophisticated 3D printers to produce interactive models of these stellar nurseries.

 

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

Categorical claims about the original function and significance of the Urfa Man—a statue of a human figure found in what is now Turkey and dating from around 11,000 years ago—should be treated____. We simply do not know enough about the people of the time to say with certainty what the statue meant to them.

 

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

Often, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is given to a single person, such as Irving Langmuir in 1932. But scientists recognized with a Nobel Prize do not often conduct their work in____ the scientific community. Instead, success in fields like chemistry is usually achieved through direct cooperation with other experts, as was the case for George Smith, who was among those awarded for "the phage display of peptides and antibodies."

 

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

The following text is from José Rizal's 1891 novel The Reign of Greed (translated by Charles Derbyshire in 1912).

 

A lady accompanied by her husband entered at that moment and took her place in one of the two vacant boxes. She had the air of a queen and gazed disdainfully at the whole house, as if to say,  "I've come later than all of you, you crowd of upstarts and provincials, I've come later than you!" There are persons who go to the theater like the contestants in a mule-race: the last one in, wins, and we know very sensible men who would ascend the scaffold rather than enter a theater before the first act.

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

The following text is from Armando Palacio Valdés's short story "The Love of Clotilde," originally published in Spanish in 1884. In the story, Don Jerónimo is a financial supporter of artists in the theater.

 

Any youth from the provinces who arrived in Madrid with a drama in his pocket could take no surer road to seeing it produced than that which led to the home of Don Jerónimo. One and all, he received them with open arms, the good and the bad alike. There is no denying that, since he was rather brusque in his ways, he never spared the young authors who asked his advice and read him their productions, but criticized vigorously, even to the verge of insult.

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

A contraction of "you all," the pronoun "y'all" has long been used as a plural version of "you" in the South and in Black communities around the US. In recent decades, most other English-speaking communities in the US have begun to use "y'all." What explains its rise in popularity? Many varieties of English have no pronoun that specifically addresses more than one person and instead must use "you" to address both one person and more than one. But "y'all" always refers to two or more people. As a result, it conveys the speaker's meaning more precisely than "you" can.

 

Which question does the text most directly attempt to answer?

Many people use the trademark "Kleenex" to refer generally to facial tissue rather than specifically to products made by Kimberly-Clark, the company that owns the trademark. As legal experts note, this may pose a problem for Kimberly-Clark. In the US, courts can cancel a trademark if they decide that its meaning is no longer specific to the trademark owner's products. If "Kleenex" were judged to have become a generic term, as "cellophane" was, other companies would be free to use it to promote similar products, making it harder for Kimberly-Clark to stand out from competitors.

 

What does the text suggest about the term "cellophane"?

The SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, has around 4,500 works of art. Digital images of hundreds of those works have been put online through the museum's website and the Google Arts & Culture project. One of the images is of The Card Game, a painting by Jacob Lawrence. In a paper, a student claims that putting a work from the museum online increases the number of people who experience that work.

 

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the underlined claim?

In a study of interactions between plants, researchers Carolina Laura Morales and Anna Traveset gathered data about flowering plants growing alongside each other in various locations. In each case, the researchers identified one plant as a "target species" and a nearby plant as a "neighboring species." An example of a neighboring species is the sticky catchfly, which grows alongside the common cow-wheat in____________

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

Days per Winter That Lakes Have Surface Ice

It is common for freshwater lakes near or above a latitude of 45° north of the equator, like Opeongo Lake in Canada, to accumulate surface ice in winter. The amount and duration of ice depends on many factors, including local weather conditions as well as the lake's depth, volume, and surface area, but a climate researcher claims that some lakes in these latitudes have seen a decline in the duration of ice between the early 1980s and the mid-2000s. She cites as a typical example____

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

All stainless steel contains varying amounts of iron, carbon, and corrosion-inhibiting chromium. However, ferritic stainless steel, often used for induction cookers, contains a higher percentage of chromium (at least 10.5%) than does austenitic stainless steel and a higher concentration of iron, which is responsible for its magnetic properties. Unlike ferritic stainless steel, austenitic stainless steel has a face-centered cubic crystalline structure resulting from the addition of nickel to the alloy. Austenitic stainless steel has two subtypes: the 300 series, often used for storage containers, and the 200 series, which has less nickel and more nitrogen than the 300 series and is used for home water tanks. Thus, stainless steel used to manufacture storage
containers will have____

 

Which choice most logically completes the text?

An upcoming exhibition will showcase Vincent van Gogh's drawing Snowy Landscape with Stooping Woman, which Van Gogh____ in the city of Nuenen nearly 150 years ago.

 

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

While the greater adjutant can be found in places like the Chao Phraya River in Thailand and the Teknaf Game Reserve in Bangladesh, more than 80 percent of this endangered stork species is found in Assam, India. There, wildlife biologist Dr. Purnima Devi Barman is on the front lines of conservation efforts that—through community involvement and scientific____ aim to bring adjutants back from near extinction.

 

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

In 1987, chemist Ahmed Zewail devised a novel technique in optical spectroscopy that allowed him to study ultrafast chemical reactions occurring within molecules. Years later, he____ for this groundbreaking research with the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the Robert A. Welch Award and hence would become known as the father of femtochemistry.

Navajo artist Sally Black's mastery of traditional weaving techniques is apparent in her expertly crafted baskets, which typically are woven from sumac (a textured and flexible material) and ____ bold colors.

 

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

Solarpunk is an art movement that imagines renewable energy—powered technology infused complementarily into nature. In Paolo Bacigalupi's solarpunk short story "Efficiency," an artificial intelligence that absorbs sustainable energies, redistributing them through intricate networks of weights and generators, ____ Chicago's energy grid.

 

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

In Los Angeles County, California, bicycle paths such as the Legg Lake bicycle path—which is 2.2 miles long—have become an increasingly popular means of travel. Moreover, lawyer and cycling ____ has identified several features of the Los Angeles landscape, like its temperate climate and mostly flat roads, that make the city naturally bike-friendly.

 

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

Within Earth's biomes, there are four main types of desert: arid, semiarid, coastal, and cold. The Kyzylkum Desert in central Asia is a semiarid desert, for ____ a total area of about , it is also one of the largest deserts of any type.

 

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

The first documented use of the English word "humiliation" is attributed to poet Geoffrey Chaucer's 1386 work "The Parson's Tale." However, Chaucer didn't write in Modern English; ____ he wrote in what we now call Middle English, which was commonly used during the period.

 

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Courses on African American history can be found at colleges and universities across the US. For example, historian Jeanne Theoharis teaches courses at Brooklyn College about the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.____at Virginia Tech University, historian Paula Marie Seniors teaches courses about Africana studies.

 

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The Coastal Futures Conservatory in Virginia is known for creating aural representations of ecological data. One such effort combines underwater audio recorded in seagrass beds with data that track rising carbon levels in the seagrass. As carbon levels increase, the audio is correspondingly distorted; ____ listeners can "hear" the changes in the carbon levels.

 

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

• In a 2021 study, researchers showed participants an unaltered image of a popular character or logo alongside two slightly altered versions.

• The Bic logo contains a cartoon man holding a pen.

• In the first alteration, the man was holding a pencil.

• In the second alteration, the man was holding nothing.

• Participants were asked to identify the correct version.

• 65.3% of participants selected the unaltered image.

The student wants to present a finding from the study. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

 

• Cinematographers work with cameras and lighting.

• They help translate film directors' ideas into visual images.

• Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) was directed by Ron Howard.

• Bradford Young was the film's cinematographer.

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to provide an example of a film Young worked on?

 

• Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO) is a band from the United States that was created in 1996.

• The band's sound combines the genres of hard rock and classical music, with an epic assembly of nearly fifty musicians that includes over a dozen singers.

• Musicians are regularly invited to perform with TSO on tour.

• Electric violinist Mark Wood toured with TSO from 1999 to 2008.

• Guitarist Bill Hudson toured with TSO in 2015.

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to emphasize the role Mark Wood played when performing with TSO?