SAT Reading and Writing — Module 1 practice test

Economists studying labor migration have long tracked remittances—the money workers send home. Over the past decade, however, they have paid growing attention to the of skills and know-how that return migrants bring back to their communities, a transfer that can reshape local businesses as much as cash does.

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

When evaluating a news site, many readers skim only the headline. The headline is written to win a click, not to carry the full argument. Source checking is the practice of opening an article and verifying what you see before deciding which claims

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

The notes of the clarinet soloist, written across the top of the score in the composer’s hand, how the theme should swell before the quiet coda.

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

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

• An electric guitar uses magnetic pickups to detect string vibration.
• A pickup contains magnets and a coil of wire.
• When a metal string vibrates in the magnetic field, it changes the field slightly.
• That change induces a small electric current in the coil.
• The current is then amplified and sent to a speaker.
• Acoustic guitars do not rely on magnetic pickups for their primary sound.

The student wants to explain how an electric guitar’s magnetic pickup produces a signal. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Psychologist Elena Vargas wanted to know whether bilingual readers could signal comprehension with eye movements while listening to a story. She first taught volunteers a left-right gaze code for yes and no. she fitted each volunteer with a lightweight eye tracker and played the story in a quiet booth.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Marine ecologist Lina Cho recorded how mussels attach to wave-battered piers. Between storms she filmed the animals at low tide, when the attachment threads were easiest to see. Young mussels first create many thin fibers, then replace some with fewer, thicker fibers as they grow. Older mussels therefore spend less energy maintaining their grip. Cho compares this change to a builder replacing temporary scaffolding with permanent supports.

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

In 1915, chemist Alice Ball developed a method for turning oil from chaulmoogra seeds into a form that could be injected and absorbed by the body. The treatment brought relief to many people with Hansen’s disease and was used for years. Ball died at age twenty-four before publishing the method, and a colleague initially received much of the credit for it. Later researchers documented Ball’s role, and her achievement is now widely recognized.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

During rehearsals for a radio drama, actor Lena Ortiz delivered one character’s lines in an unusually flat voice. The scene opened with ordinary household conversation. The director began to suggest more emotion, but Ortiz asked the group to record the entire scene first. On the recording, a ticking clock grew louder beneath Ortiz’s speech, and her restrained delivery made the character’s eventual outburst especially startling. The director kept the take without requesting changes. These details most strongly suggest that Ortiz

Which choice most logically completes the text?

A municipal office gradually replaced paper invoice processing with a digital system. Clerks recorded the share of invoices handled digitally at the end of each year from 2019 through 2023, and those yearly percentages appear in the graph.

According to the graph, during which period did the share of invoices processed digitally increase by the greatest number of percentage points?

A historian researching traveling libraries in the 1930s claims that the service broadened rural readers’ access to books, even though the books selected often reflected urban librarians’ preferences more than rural readers’ requests. Traveling book trucks made regular scheduled stops in isolated towns too small to keep a permanent collection. The historian examines correspondence between a librarian and a village teacher. The surviving file spans several months of visits and includes both official reports and informal notes on local readers.

Which quotation from the correspondence most effectively illustrates the historian’s claim?

After a minor coastal earthquake, seismologists compared P-wave arrival times at three independent stations. The measurements that the tremor originated offshore, and the delays were consistent with a source beyond the continental shelf.

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

A community radio station recently donated hundreds of concert tapes to the city archive. Many recordings were stored on reels that had become brittle archivists nevertheless recovered most of the performances by playing the reels at reduced speed. The resulting digital files preserve rare appearances by several local jazz musicians.

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

Materials scientist Elena Park tested a new battery inside a sealed chamber equipped with heat and pressure sensors. When gas accumulated during the test, a pressure valve opened automatically, damage to the delicate instruments. Park’s team later repeated the test under warmer conditions to confirm that the valve would respond just as quickly.

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

Many nineteenth-century city guides emphasized grand boulevards and monuments, giving readers an image of orderly urban life. Historian Amara Osei examined household ledgers and neighborhood petitions from the same period. Those records describe crowded courtyards, informal markets, and residents’ negotiations over shared wells. the everyday city documented in these sources was far less orderly than the city portrayed in official guides.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

To measure urban heat, researchers can install street-level sensors or analyze satellite images. Sensors record frequent temperature changes at precise locations but cover only limited areas. Satellites survey an entire city at once, though they pass overhead only periodically and measure surface rather than air temperature. Many studies combine the approaches so that each supplies context the other lacks.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

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

• Urban planner Dalia Vo analyzed volunteer records from twenty-four community gardens.
• Gardens with tool-sharing lockers logged 29 percent more volunteer hours than gardens without lockers.
• Gardens with lockers were also more likely to employ paid coordinators.
• Vo did not assign lockers randomly to the gardens.
• She concluded that lockers may encourage participation, but her analysis cannot isolate their effect from that of other garden features.

The student wants to report the finding while accurately qualifying Vo’s conclusion. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Writing for a scholarly journal, translator Adeel Rahman urges colleagues to be when choosing English substitutes for culturally specific kinship terms in Yoruba verse: a casual paraphrase can flatten social nuance that the poem depends on. The short essay cites several recent English translations and asks how those versions handle address, rank, and obligation.

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

Marketing researchers have proposed that the more strongly people perceive a product as locally made, the more likely they are to choose it. In a survey about a new brand of oatmeal, participants who lived in rural counties rated the oatmeal’s local credentials far less favorably than participants who lived in the same brand’s home city. Each participant saw the same product description and the same label images. All other things being equal, if the researchers’ proposal is correct, this finding suggests that

Which choice most logically completes the text?

“The Railway Hotel” is a 1928 short story by Elena Maren. In the story, Mara waits at a remote railway hotel after receiving a message that her brother’s train may have derailed. A critic claims that Mara tries to conceal her growing fear from the other guests by performing exaggerated cheerfulness, though her physical behavior reveals her distress.

Which quotation from the story most effectively illustrates the critic’s claim?

Botanist Mei Torres bred evening primroses that continue releasing a floral scent compound after the flowers’ first day open. The compound is one of several volatiles that evening primroses emit at dusk. Standard plants release little of the compound after day 1. Torres proposed that sustained release prolongs attraction to native bees rather than substantially increasing the flowers’ initial attractiveness. Native bees were the flowers’ principal pollinators in the region where the plants were grown. In a field enclosure, researchers counted visits to scent-enhanced and standard flowers at the same times of day. The flowers were matched for petal area and nectar production, so those traits were unlikely to explain visitation differences.

Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to support Torres’s proposal?

Some paleoclimatologists use fossil leaves’ edge shapes to estimate past temperatures: among many living plant communities, warmer climates contain a higher proportion of smooth-edged leaves. The approach is inexpensive and can be applied wherever leaf fossils are abundant, so it has become a standard first estimate. Geologist Amina Hart examined a fossil bed with many smooth-edged species, apparently indicating warmth. Yet growth rings in fossil wood suggested brief growing seasons, and several of the smooth-edged leaves belonged to lineages adapted to cold. Hart concludes that leaf-edge estimates can mislead when ancient plant communities contain ecological combinations unlike those represented in the modern collections used to calibrate the method.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Since engineers installed a pressure gauge beneath the Marston Glacier in 2016, a network of sensors brief shifts in subglacial water flow during every spring thaw. The network is still transmitting data, and researchers now compare the recurring shifts with changes in the glacier’s speed to determine whether rising water pressure temporarily reduces friction at the bed.

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

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

• Archaeologists use several methods to estimate the ages of objects.
• Tree-ring crossdating matches ring-width patterns in wooden objects to a dated regional sequence.
• When enough rings are preserved, crossdating can identify the calendar year in which a tree was cut.
• Obsidian hydration dating measures a water-rich layer that forms after volcanic glass is chipped.
• The thickness of that layer is used to estimate how much time has passed since the glass was chipped.

The student wants to distinguish tree-ring crossdating from obsidian hydration dating. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Archaeologists once assumed that symbols pressed into clay storage jars served only a ritual purpose. Excavators have now cataloged hundreds of such jars from storerooms attached to ordinary houses. The markings are not entirely specify the quantities of grain delivered to particular households.

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

Conservators once classified the brown thumbprints in several fifteenth-century herbals as damage left by careless readers. Book historian Anika Ferrell noticed that the prints cluster beside remedies containing costly imported spices, not beside common-ingredient recipes. Chemical analysis also found traces of flour and animal fat in some prints. Ferrell proposes that cooks marked pages while testing whether expensive remedies could be reproduced with household substitutes.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Dating medieval manuscripts precisely has always been difficult when documentary records are incomplete. Radiocarbon assays of two disputed medieval manuscripts produced overlapping date ranges that neither confirm nor rule out a shared workshop. Paleographers had long treated the hands as products of rival scriptoria on stylistic grounds alone. several scholars now treat single-workshop authorship as a live hypothesis and reexamine watermark evidence that earlier catalogs dismissed as inconclusive.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The simple story that a single press “democratized” reading overnight still circulates in survey lectures and in popular histories written for general readers. Historians now that story: rather than treat cost, literacy, and distribution as minor limits on a sudden democratization, they show those barriers interacting to decide who could actually use early printed books.

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