SAT Reading and Writing Practice test 1

"Reseeding native plants is essential for restoring a damaged grassland. ____, native seed can be expensive and is often in limited supply, which slows many restoration projects."

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The text reads: "Although the storm had passed by sunrise ____ many of the downtown streets remained flooded for hours." Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Urban planners in the twentieth century traditionally widened streets and added lanes to relieve congestion. Yet research from dozens of cities across Europe and North America has shown the opposite effect: added capacity attracts new drivers, and within a few years roads return to their previous level of congestion. Newer street designs deliberately reduce capacity instead, encouraging walking, cycling, and transit use.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text overall?

"Coral polyps build their stony skeletons from calcium carbonate dissolved in seawater. ____, as the ocean absorbs more atmospheric carbon dioxide and grows more acidic, the dissolved carbonate becomes less available, and corals build new skeleton more slowly."

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Paleontologists dating ancient deposits typically combine two complementary methods. Radiometric techniques yield absolute ages by measuring the decay of radioactive isotopes; biostratigraphic dating assigns relative ages by comparing the species of fossils present in a layer to species whose lifespans are already known from other dated deposits. In layers where one method produces a clear date but the other produces no usable signal, researchers prefer to report a range of plausible ages rather than a single number.

Which inference about dating practice is best supported by the text?

The text reads: "After the championship game ended, the ____ jerseys were collected and sent to the cleaners." Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

While preparing a profile of an engineer, a student took the following notes:

• Maria Ramos designs prosthetic hands for children.
• Ramos's prosthetic hands use 3D-printed plastic rather than the metal alloys used in traditional designs.
• A traditional metal prosthetic hand costs approximately $20,000.-Ramo{s}^{\prime }s3D-printedhandscostroughly$50 in materials.
• Ramos donates her designs as open-source files anyone can download and print.

The student wants to emphasize the affordability of Ramos's design. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to achieve this goal?

A study of gray squirrels in eastern oak forests found that the animals recover roughly 85 percent of the acorns they bury, relying on spatial memory of nearby trees and landmarks rather than on scent. The unrecovered acorns germinate at higher rates than acorns left on the surface, helping to spread the very trees that the squirrels depend on.

According to the text, how do gray squirrels primarily locate the acorns they have buried?

The text reads: "The novel ____ won the Pulitzer Prize last year will be adapted into a six-part television series next fall." Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

While studying a contemporary poet, a student took the following notes:

• Akari Sakamoto was born in Sapporo in 1936.
• Sakamoto wrote primarily in classical Japanese poetic forms.
• Her best-known collection, Reed Light, was published in 1968.
• Reed Light contains 110 tanka, a traditional five-line Japanese poem form.

The student wants to introduce Reed Light to an audience unfamiliar with Sakamoto's work. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to achieve this goal?

Monarch butterflies migrate as much as 3,000 miles from Canada to central Mexico each fall, returning to the same small cluster of oyamel fir groves where their great-grandparents wintered. They navigate using the position of the sun and an internal time compensation that adjusts for the sun's apparent movement across the sky throughout the day. The journey takes between four and five months, and no single butterfly makes the round trip.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text overall?

"Solar panels generate the most electricity in midday sun, when irradiance is at its peak. ____, household electricity demand typically peaks in the early evening, when panels produce far less. The mismatch is one of the central problems that residential battery-storage systems are designed to solve."

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The text reads: "Walking through the old-growth forest at dawn, ____ admired the way mist clung to the moss-covered branches." Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Many wildflower species rely on ants — not bees — to disperse their seeds. The seeds carry a small fatty appendage called an elaiosome that worker ants harvest as food and carry back to the colony; the seeds themselves are typically dropped in the soil near the nest, where they germinate the following spring under more favorable conditions than they would on the open surface.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

The text reads: "Each of the volunteers ____ a name tag before the orientation began." Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

While researching pollinator-dependent plants in Mexico, a student took the following notes:

• Botanist Idris Adekoya studied agave plants in northern Mexico for 12 years.
• Adekoya's central hypothesis was that agave seed production depends on a specific moth species that visits the flowers at night.
• During the study period, local populations of the moth declined by roughly 60 percent.
• Across Adekoya's study sites, agave seed yields dropped by approximately 40 percent over the same period.

The student wants to summarize the evidence that links the moth decline to the decline in agave seed yields. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to achieve this goal?

Roman concrete structures built two thousand years ago — the dome of the Pantheon, the harbor breakwaters that still line parts of the Mediterranean coast — remain intact today. Recent chemical analysis has identified small lumps of unmixed lime in the original concrete that, when exposed to water through small cracks, react with the surrounding silica to form new minerals that seal the damage from within.

According to the text, what role do the lumps of lime play in Roman concrete?

A team surveying songbirds in two adjacent restored prairies recorded the number of individuals of each species observed across a two-week period in May. The table summarizes their counts.

Prairie A has been managed for denser ground litter and taller native bunchgrasses than Prairie B. A researcher hypothesizes: Restored prairies managed for denser litter and taller grass support disproportionately more bobolinks and grasshopper sparrows than otherwise similar prairies with shorter, sparser vegetation.

Which choice from the table most directly supports the researcher's hypothesis?

Many home gardeners assume that vibrant flowering plants require many hours of direct sun. In reality, more than half of common ornamental species — including hostas, ferns, hellebores, and astilbes — produce their best foliage and flowers in partial or even full shade. Matching each species to the actual light at the planting site matters more than chasing the sunniest corner of the yard.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text overall?

Some urban-planning researchers have proposed that increased street-tree canopy lowers neighborhood temperatures during summer heat waves. To convincingly establish the claim, they would need to compare temperatures across neighborhoods that resemble one another in their populations, infrastructure, and built density but differ chiefly in canopy cover.

Which finding would best support the claim that increased street-tree canopy lowers summer temperatures?

While researching the history of patchwork quilting in the United States, a student took the following notes:

• The pieced-quilt tradition in the United States emerged in the late 1700s.
• Early quilters used scraps of leftover fabric from clothing and household linens.
• 19th-century pattern books standardized many quilt block designs.
• The Log Cabin pattern was first published in a national pattern book in 1869.
• Contemporary quilters often purchase new fabric specifically designed and printed for piecing.

The student wants to generalize about how the quilt tradition has changed over time. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to achieve this goal?

"The acoustic engineer chose an unusual mix of ceiling materials — bamboo, felt, and tightly woven fabric — because each absorbs sound at different frequencies and works in ____ with the others to balance the room's overall response."

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

"Though the symphony's third movement was widely admired, critics agreed that the second was its most ____: it had been revised seven times, but its melodic line remained restless, unsettled, and almost unrecognizable from one orchestral recording to the next."

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

The text reads: "The forecast predicted clear skies all weekend; however ____ Saturday morning began with heavy rain that lasted through the afternoon." Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

"After decades of neglect, the old reading room of the public library underwent a ____ restoration: a team of conservators spent nearly three years cleaning each plaster medallion and rebinding more than four thousand books by hand."

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

While researching urban beekeeping, a student took the following notes:

• Urban beehives have become more common in cities since 2010.
• Honey from urban hives often contains distinct floral signatures.
• Researcher Anya Patel analyzed 200 urban hives across 12 cities.
• Patel's main finding was that urban honey shows greater floral diversity than rural honey on average.

The student wants to emphasize a result of Patel's research. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to achieve this goal?

The text reads: "The collection of antique cameras displayed in the second-floor gallery ____ from the 1950s and 1960s." Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

While researching evidence for the theory of seafloor spreading, a student took the following notes:

• In the early 1970s, oceanographer Walter Pitman recorded a sequence of magnetic stripes preserved in the rock of the Atlantic seafloor.
• The stripes record the direction of Earth's magnetic field at the moment each section of seafloor rock cooled and hardened.
• Pitman found that the stripe pattern on the western side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge was a near-perfect mirror image of the pattern on the eastern side.
• The mirror-symmetric pattern provided independent confirmation of the theory that new seafloor is created at mid-ocean ridges and spreads outward.

The student wants to introduce Pitman's finding to an audience already familiar with the theory of seafloor spreading. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to achieve this goal?

"Honeybees use specific movement patterns to communicate the direction and distance of food sources to other workers. ____, the well-studied waggle dance encodes both the angle relative to the sun and the approximate distance to a target."

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

A long-term observation study of meadow plants and their pollinators found that flower species with deeper corollas were visited almost exclusively by long-tongued bees, while species with shallower corollas attracted a broader mix of pollinators. When long-tongued bee populations dropped sharply in one region, deep-corolla flowers produced significantly less seed in that region — though other pollinator species there remained common.

Which inference is best supported by the text?