SAT Practice Test #1

1.

2. Former astronaut Ellen Ochoa says that although she doesn’t have a definite idea of when it might happen, she _______ that humans will someday need to be able to live in other environments than those found on Earth. This conjecture informs her interest in future research missions to the moon. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

3. Beginning in the 1950s, Navajo Nation legislator Annie Dodge Wauneka continuously worked to promote public health; this _______ effort involved traveling throughout the vast Navajo homeland and writing a medical dictionary for speakers of Diné bizaad, the Navajo language. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

4. Following the principles of community-based participatory research, tribal nations and research institutions are equal partners in health studies conducted on reservations. A collaboration between the Crow Tribe and Montana State University _______ this model: tribal citizens worked alongside scientists to design the methodology and continue to assist in data collection. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

5. Given that the conditions in binary star systems should make planetary formation nearly impossible, it’s not surprising that the existence of planets in such systems has lacked _______ explanation. Roman Rafikov and Kedron Silsbee shed light on the subject when they used modeling to determine a complex set of factors that could support planets’ development. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

6. The parasitic dodder plant increases its reproductive success by flowering at the same time as the host plant it has latched onto. In 2020, Jianqiang Wu and his colleagues determined that the tiny dodder achieves this _______ with its host by absorbing and utilizing a protein the host produces when it is about to flower. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

7. Seminole/Muscogee director Sterlin Harjo _______ television’s tendency to situate Native characters in the distant past: this rejection is evident in his series Reservation Dogs, which revolves around teenagers who dress in contemporary styles and whose dialogue is laced with current slang. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

8. In 2007, computer scientist Luis von Ahn was working on converting printed books into a digital format. He found that some words were distorted enough that digital scanners couldn’t recognize them, but most humans could easily read them. Based on that finding, von Ahn invented a simple security test to keep automated “bots” out of websites. The first version of the reCAPTCHA test asked users to type one known word and one of the many words scanners couldn’t recognize. Correct answers proved the users were humans and added data to the book-digitizing project. Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

9. The following text is from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth. Lily Bart and a companion are walking through a park.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove.

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

10. A study by a team including finance professor Madhu Veeraraghavan suggests that exposure to sunshine during the workday can lead to overly optimistic behavior. Using data spanning from 1994 to 2010 for a set of US companies, the team compared over 29,000 annual earnings forecasts to the actual earnings later reported by those companies. The team found that the greater the exposure to sunshine at work in the two weeks before a manager submitted an earnings forecast, the more the manager’s forecast exceeded what the company actually earned that year.
Which choice best states the function of the underlined sentence in the overall structure of the text?

11.

 The following text is adapted from Edith Nesbit’s 1906 novel The Railway Children. Mother did not spend all her time in paying dull [visits] to dull ladies, and sitting dully at home waiting for dull ladies to pay [visits] to her. She was almost always there, ready to play with the children, and read to them, and help them to do their home-lessons. Besides this she used to write stories for them while they were at school, and read them aloud after tea, and she always made up funny pieces of poetry for their birthdays and for other great occasions. According to the text, what is true about Mother?

12.

• The following text is from Maggie Pogue Johnson’s
  1910 poem “Poet of Our Race.” In this poem, the
  speaker is addressing Paul Laurence Dunbar, a Black
  author.
  Thou, with stroke of mighty pen,
  Hast told of joy and mirth,
  And read the hearts and souls of men
  As cradled from their birth.
  The language of the flowers,
  Thou hast read them all,
  And e’en the little brook
  Responded to thy call.
  Which choice best states the main purpose of the
  text?

13. “To You” is an 1856 poem by Walt Whitman. In the
poem, Whitman suggests that readers, whom he
addresses directly, have not fully understood
themselves, writing, _______ Which quotation from “To You” most effectively
illustrates the claim?

14. Born in 1891 to a Quechua-speaking family in the
Andes Mountains of Peru, Martín Chambi is today
considered to be one of the most renowned figures of
Latin American photography. In a paper for an art
history class, a student claims that Chambi’s
photographs have considerable ethnographic
value—in his work, Chambi was able to capture
diverse elements of Peruvian society, representing his
subjects with both dignity and authenticity.
Which finding, if true, would most directly support
the student’s claim?

15. In the mountains of Brazil, Barbacenia tomentosa
and Barbacenia macrantha—two plants in the
Velloziaceae family—establish themselves on soilless,
nutrient-poor patches of quartzite rock. Plant
ecologists Anna Abrahão and Patricia de Britto Costa
used microscopic analysis to determine that the roots
of B. tomentosa and B. macrantha, which grow
directly into the quartzite, have clusters of fine hairs
near the root tip; further analysis indicated that these
hairs secrete both malic and citric acids. The
researchers hypothesize that the plants depend on
dissolving underlying rock with these acids, as the
process not only creates channels for continued
growth but also releases phosphates that provide the
vital nutrient phosphorus.
Which finding, if true, would most directly support
the researchers’ hypothesis?

16. Herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs could grow more
than 100 feet long and weigh up to 80 tons, and some
researchers have attributed the evolution of
sauropods to such massive sizes to increased plant
production resulting from high levels of atmospheric
carbon dioxide during the Mesozoic era. However,
there is no evidence of significant spikes in carbon
dioxide levels coinciding with relevant periods in
sauropod evolution, such as when the first large
sauropods appeared, when several sauropod lineages
underwent further evolution toward gigantism, or
when sauropods reached their maximum known
sizes, suggesting that _______ Which choice most logically completes the text?

17.

Some researchers studying Indigenous actors and filmmakers in the United States have turned their attention to the early days of cinema, particularly the 1910s and 1920s, when people like James Young Deer, Dark Cloud, Edwin Carewe, and Lillian St. Cyr (known professionally as Red Wing) were involved in one way or another with numerous films. In fact, so many films and associated records for this era have been lost that counts of those four figures’ output should be taken as bare minimums rather than totals; it’s entirely possible, for example, that _______

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

18. In documents called judicial opinions, judges explain the reasoning behind their legal rulings, and in those explanations they sometimes cite and discuss historical and contemporary philosophers. Legal scholar and philosopher Anita L. Allen argues that while judges are naturally inclined to mention philosophers whose views align with their own positions, the strongest judicial opinions consider and rebut potential objections; discussing philosophers whose views conflict with judges’ views could therefore _______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

19. Public-awareness campaigns about the need to reduce single-use plastics can be successful, says researcher Kim Borg of Monash University in Australia, when these campaigns give consumers a choice: for example, Japan achieved a 40 percent reduction in plastic-bag use after cashiers were instructed to ask customers whether _______ wanted a bag. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

20.

Alicia Montesinos-Navarro, Isabelle Storer, and Rocío Perez-Barrales recently examined several plots within a diverse plant community in southeast Spain. The researchers calculated that if individual plants were randomly distributed on this particular landscape, only about 15% would be with other plants in patches of vegetation. They counted the number of juvenile plants of five species growing in patches of vegetation and the number growing alone on bare ground and compared those numbers to what would be expected if the plants were randomly distributed. Based on these results, they claim that plants of these species that grow in close proximity to other plants gain an advantage at an early developmental stage.

Which choice best describes data from the table that support the researchers’ claim?