SAT Reading and Writing — Module 2 (easier) practice test

The museum agreed to return the carved stools, but the curator insisted the ownership transfer paperwork be ironclad before any crate left the loading dock.

As used in the text, what does the word “ironclad” most nearly mean?

At a university herbarium, staff photograph most pressed plant sheets under even light and file the images in a shared database so that researchers can study specimens without handling the originals. the most fragile nineteenth-century sheets are still withheld from the scanner because their paper cannot tolerate the light.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Clawhammer banjo is a playing style that developed in Appalachian communities. The name refers to a downward striking motion. The style was shaped by older banjo traditions and by dance tunes that became widely popular in the southern United States in the late nineteenth century. As dance repertoires evolved in the early twentieth century, new figures demanded sharper accents and quicker changes of pattern, prompting corresponding changes in clawhammer technique.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

Marine biologists at the University of Queensland have assembled a long-running observational dataset. The dataset, along with thousands of coral observations from the reef, scientists to track bleaching over successive summers.

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:

• Coastal villages in Chile’s Atacama region sometimes lack reliable freshwater.
• Deep-well pumping can supply water but requires substantial electricity and can deplete aquifers.
• Villages can instead use fog-harvesting nets that trap moisture from coastal fog.
• The water drips into collection tanks with little ongoing energy use.
• Fog harvesting is less disruptive to local aquifers than continuous well pumping.

The student wants to explain an advantage of fog harvesting. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Glacial erratics can look haphazardly placed on a hillside. Hikers often pause beside them, assuming a landslide or a farmer left the boulders there. Their positions are rarely many of the stones lie along paths that match ancient ice-flow routes mapped by geologists.

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

Archaeologist Noor Haddad’s team wanted to determine where glazed tile fragments found along a medieval trade route had been made. The researchers used a portable scanner to measure trace elements in each fragment. They then compared those chemical profiles with profiles of clay collected near known kiln sites. Close matches allowed the team to link groups of fragments to particular kilns.

According to the text, how did Haddad’s team determine where the tile fragments had been made?

A municipal archive is processing a backlog of donated materials that arrived already sorted into boxes by type. To schedule the remaining work, the staff timed how long it takes to catalog one box of photographs, letters, maps, and posters under ordinary working conditions. After reviewing those recorded times, an archive manager claims that cataloging a box of letters took about twice as long as cataloging a box of posters.

Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to support the manager’s claim?

Archaeologists excavating a twelfth-century settlement far from the sea uncovered six storage jars. The jars stood upright in a small storeroom, their rims still coated with sealing clay. Clay analysis showed that the jars were made near the settlement, but residue inside them came from a dye-producing shellfish found only on the coast. Because the dye-producing tissue deteriorates quickly after collection, ancient dyers generally processed it near where it was harvested. Taken together, the evidence suggests that

Which choice most logically completes the text?

A historian studying the introduction of gas streetlights in Bellwether argues that, in the first years of public lighting, the lamps made evening travel easier in the central commercial district but did little for residents of outlying neighborhoods. The historian cites an 1848 municipal report comparing lamp coverage and pedestrian activity across districts.

Which quotation from the report would most strongly support the historian’s claim?

Reviewing a draft, the poet decides she will a stanza that feels forced, cutting it entirely rather than trying to salvage every awkward line.

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

Visibility can drop within a few minutes, leaving little time to judge nearby distances by sight alone. Foghorns remain in use in many harbors, for the sound they produce travels through dense ships have long relied on them as a warning.

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

Architectural historian Emil Sato investigated narrow openings near the roof of the nineteenth-century Bellmere Market Hall. Some scholars had treated the openings as decoration. Painted moldings around the vents had long encouraged that view among visitors walking the gallery. Sato’s airflow model showed that they released rising warm air, keeping the stalls below cooler. This result resembles what occurs in older granaries, whose perforated walls protect stored grain by carrying warm air away. Sato therefore argued that the market hall’s openings were functional rather than merely ornamental.

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

Ecologist Nia Ramos compares recordings from city parks to study how traffic noise affects birdsong. Although her data show variation among individual birds, at present the average pitch of songs recorded beside busy roads higher than the average pitch of those recorded in quiet parks, a difference that may help birds communicate over traffic.

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:

• Architect Soraya Dene toured the Maru textile mill in 1966.
• Her sketchbook from the tour copies the mill’s punch-card patterns.
• Dene designed the Leto Library the following year.
• The library’s screen wall repeats one of those punch-card patterns in concrete.
• Dene described the screen as a record of local industry.

The student wants to explain how the textile mill influenced Dene’s library design. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

The pocket spectrometer cannot identify every mineral in a mixed sample collected from a weathered outcrop. Its low weight, makes it useful to field geologists who must hike several miles to remote sites.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Early surveyors cast ash-covered slopes as uniformly barren. Later fieldwork instead mapped a pattern of fertility that varies with ash age and rainfall. Plots on decades-old deposits supported shrubs and grasses, whereas fresh ash remained nearly bare.

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

Computational linguist Joon Park evaluated two speech-to-text systems on the same 200 recordings. The systems, labeled Cedar and Flint, were designed for everyday dictation rather than for studio-quality audio. Each recording was tested once without background noise and once with café noise. He scored each transcript by the share of words recognized correctly and kept microphone placement constant. Park argued that Cedar was more resistant to noise than Flint, although Flint performed better in the quiet setting. The results are shown in the graph.

Which choice best describes data from the graph that support Park’s argument?

Historian Mireya Salas studies municipal reading rooms established in Calder in the early 1900s. Salas argues that the rooms expanded newspaper access among factory workers but that limited evening hours prevented many night-shift employees from receiving the same benefit.

Which quotation from Calder’s municipal records most effectively illustrates Salas’s claim?

After the Glenford Museum extended its Saturday and Sunday hours, monthly attendance totals rose. Two explanations were offered: the longer hours attracted weekend visitors, or a citywide campaign increased visits every day. Attendance records show, however, that weekday visits declined during the same period while weekend visits more than doubled. Thus, the increase in total attendance

Which choice most logically completes the text?

To determine how migrating monarch butterflies orient themselves during flight, biologist Elena Vasquez and her team tracked butterflies fitted with tiny radio tags across several migration seasons. The team found that the butterflies relied primarily on the position of the sun, adjusting their internal compass throughout the day, but also used Earth’s magnetic field as a backup cue on overcast days when the sun was not visible.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Installed to prevent overwatering during a dry summer trial, six moisture sensors record how wet the soil is around the tomato and pepper beds; a single battery, rather than the solar panels mounted above the greenhouse roof, powers the sensors at night. Because readings every minute, the battery must be recharged daily.

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

Decades of fossil discoveries have reshaped views of dinosaur integument. Feathered coverings were not limited to one dinosaur lineage. , fossils attributed to both small hunters and larger plant-eaters show filamentous structures along the body.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Histories of public timekeeping often credit railway companies with teaching nineteenth-century towns to organize daily life by a shared clock. In that account, coordinated timetables forced communities to abandon purely local hours. Municipal records from Bellweather, however, show that officials scheduled market openings, school sessions, and canal traffic by the town-hall clock decades before a railway reached the town. Those entries treat the town-hall clock as an ordinary civic instrument. The railway later required that clock to match regional time rather than local solar time. Thus, rail travel accelerated and standardized an existing reliance on public clocks, but it did not necessarily create that reliance.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Marine biologist Sora Patel knew that some damselfish recognize their reef by its low-frequency sounds. The fish had hatched nearby they spent several weeks drifting offshore before returning. Patel’s experiment was designed to find out whether recordings from a neighboring reef, played through an underwater speaker, would attract the juveniles.

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:

• Astronomer Keisha Bloom led a radio survey of newly detected pulsars in 2021.
• Pulsar J1842 has a spin period of 0.34 seconds.
• Pulsar J1842 lies about 4,200 light-years from Earth.
• Pulsar J1911 has a spin period of 1.12 seconds.
• Pulsar J1911 lies about 9,800 light-years from Earth.
• Faster-spinning pulsars are generally younger than slower ones.

The student wants to synthesize the spin period and distance of Pulsar J1842 into one claim. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Historians of the early book trade emphasize that printing’s importance lay not only in making texts cheaper but in accelerating the of ideas across Europe, as identical arguments could reach distant readers within months rather than years. Early workshops soon multiplied in busy port cities, and cheaper paper made much larger print runs possible.

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