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

The following text is from Anika Lorne’s 2021 novel The Quiet Overture.

The ballet’s brief opening tableau asked the full company to hold perfectly still as the short overture faded into silence. After months of rehearsal, the corps finally held a clean line from wing to wing, each dancer’s shoulder matching the next as if drawn with a single ruler.

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

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

• In 2022, marine biologist Nia Calder studied eelgrass restoration in an Oregon bay.
• She planted equal numbers of eelgrass shoots in two kinds of plots.
• In some plots, shoots were planted in dense clusters; in others, shoots were arranged in evenly spaced rows.
• After twelve months, the clustered plots retained 30 percent more living shoots.
• Calder concluded that clustering may help new eelgrass beds become established in areas with strong tides.

The student wants to present Calder’s study and its conclusion. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

In the following fictional passage, Mara’s family is preparing to sell its orchard.

Mara visits the orchard her family is preparing to sell. She walks past the shed where her grandfather once sharpened tools and pauses beneath the pear tree she climbed as a child. The warm afternoon air still smells faintly of crushed fruit from the last family harvest. At the gate, the buyer asks whether she needs another day before signing the papers. Mara takes the old brass key from her pocket and places it in his open hand.

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

One long-running satellite mission tracked Earth’s reflected sunlight until its sensors failed in 2018. networks of ground-based pyranometers continued measuring solar radiation at fixed stations, allowing researchers to compare the two records for overlapping years.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

At sunrise, a rover sampled three soil patches near a crater sent the data to a station twenty kilometers away. Since a dust storm was near, engineers had set the rover to finish both tasks before noon. The data arrived just as wind began to hide the station’s cameras from view.

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

Before a museum opened a sealed shipping crate in 2022, its conservators reviewed photographs of the contents. The images were especially useful because the conservators every painted panel before the crate left the artist’s studio the previous month. When water stains appeared inside the newly opened crate, the earlier photographs showed that the panels had originally been dry.

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

In the late nineteenth century, Bellford grew rapidly around its mills. Official schedules for Bellford’s nineteenth-century public reading room state that it closed at five each afternoon. Those printed schedules were posted each year at the entrance. Historian Asha Moreno, however, found repeated bills for oil used in the room’s lamps after dark. She also found factory workers’ diaries describing evening discussions there. Although neither source identifies who authorized the gatherings, the evidence indicates that

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Conservators tested three pigment coatings intended for outdoor murals. Each coating was brushed onto identical sample panels and allowed to dry under the same indoor conditions. Because sunlight can fade pigments, the team measured each coating’s color intensity before and after 100 hours of ultraviolet exposure. Intensity was scored on a fixed scale, with higher values indicating a more saturated color. The conservators concluded that the coating with the highest intensity before exposure had the lowest intensity after exposure. The table shows the team’s results.

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to support the conservators’ conclusion?

Plant biologist Samira Patel and her colleagues investigated whether a thin clay coating could help grass seeds survive dry conditions. In greenhouse trials, coated seeds retained moisture longer and germinated more often than uncoated seeds when watering was limited. When water was plentiful, however, the two groups germinated at similar rates. The findings suggest that the coating may improve germination under drought conditions without providing the same advantage in consistently wet environments.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Historian Sora Velez studies the 1878 renovation of a municipal market hall. The hall occupied a central block and housed crowded rows of stalls along one aisle. Velez draws on council minutes, contractor invoices, and petitions signed by stallholders. Before the project, officials rarely intervened in how goods were arranged or sold. Vendors set out produce, cloth, and household wares each morning according to long-standing custom. Velez argues that the renovation represented a limited administrative change: the city improved the building itself, but sellers continued to control many aspects of their daily work.

Which quotation from a historical record most effectively illustrates Velez’s claim?

City managers defended the new zoning rules as : the code limited tower height in quiet residential blocks while still allowing taller buildings near transit hubs.

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

The following text is adapted from Juno Farrar’s 2020 short story Second Desk Light. A young violinist is about to audition.

Before her violin audition, Leena had rehearsed every bow stroke but not the walk from the wings to the center of the stage. The empty hall seemed enormous, each red seat another witness to a mistake that had not yet happened. Then the stage manager quietly adjusted the music stand to Leena’s height and whispered, “Take the first measure for yourself.” The hall did not shrink, but it stopped leaning toward her. Leena raised the bow and waited until her breathing matched the opening rhythm.

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

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

• A survey examined 240 orchard trees.
• Thirty-five percent of the trees—about 84—showed signs of a fungal infection.
• A treatment succeeds on three-fourths of infected trees.
• If every infected tree in the survey were treated, about 63 would be expected to recover.

The student wants to estimate how many infected trees in the survey would recover if treated and explain the basis for that estimate. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Paleoclimatologist Dana Whitlock has shown that sulfate aerosols from the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora global temperatures for roughly three years afterward, a cooling documented in ice cores and tree rings.

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

After comparing recordings from dozens of underwater microphones, acoustician Priya Nanduri identified three conditions that consistently distorted estimates of whale distance during field surveys strong surface winds, echoes from steep seafloor ridges, and overlapping calls from nearby pods. Each condition altered the arrival time or apparent intensity of a call.

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

Photographic plates record starlight as deposits of silver grains, but the amount of darkening rises less and less as exposure increases. When archivists digitize a plate using software that assumes darkening is directly proportional to exposure, differences among the brightest stars are compressed. variability estimates derived from such scans will be systematically biased downward for the most highly exposed stars.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Marine archaeologist Rina Okafor found roof tiles at a port settlement whose clay came from a distant island, evidence that builders imported materials. Yet the mortar joining those tiles was mixed from local sand. The mortar finding therefore the claim that the settlement’s roofs were imported as complete units.

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

Two models predict a compound’s solubility. After comparing each model’s predicted values with laboratory measurements taken at four temperatures, a chemist concludes that Model B fits the observations more closely across the full temperature range.

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to support the chemist’s conclusion?

Film scholars often distinguish between diegetic sound, which originates inside the story world, and nondiegetic sound, such as a score the characters cannot hear. The distinction is now a standard classroom tool for analyzing how directors layer music against on-screen action. In many thrillers, a swelling orchestral cue is nondiegetic, while a radio in a kitchen is diegetic. But theorist Helena Vance has argued that those labels alone cannot fully account for how a film makes meaning—she maintains that many sounds move between the two categories over the course of a single scene, so the labels describe moments rather than sounds.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

A survey using automated microphones found that reed frogs, which produce low-frequency calls, accounted for a larger share of recorded calls on rainy nights than on dry nights, while canopy frogs, which produce high-frequency calls, accounted for a smaller share. In calibration trials conducted before the survey, both species were detected equally well in dry conditions. During simulated rain, however, the microphones missed many high-frequency canopy-frog calls but continued to register most low-frequency reed-frog calls. The published totals were based solely on detections from the microphones. The survey results thus

Which choice most logically completes the text?

In 1880, the Kingdom of Elsor assigned standardized names to towns that had long been known by multiple local names. Before the decree, a single town might appear under two or three spellings in the same packet of letters. Everyday speech was left unregulated, and shop signs were not required to change. Historian Pavi Ren claims that the campaign rapidly changed usage in provincial government correspondence but only gradually affected merchants’ correspondence, where older names persisted alongside the standardized ones.

Which quotation from a study of surviving documents would most directly support Ren’s interpretation?

Sound artists were increasingly drawn to environments most listeners overlooked entirely. In one exhibition, sound artist Mira Venn invited visitors to listen to recordings of the hidden buzz of cables and transformers. The recordings—of both ambient hums and the machines that created a haunting effect in her installation Hidden Currents.

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

New sediment cores from a high-altitude lake have led some geologists to argue that alpine glaciers in the region retreated earlier than once thought. This claim that ice cover vanished abruptly around 8,000 years ago cannot stand, researchers Ana Ruiz and Ben Okada reply, unless competing explanations for the sediment layers are first excluded.

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

A study in three dry inland cities found that irrigated rooftop gardens reduced roof-surface temperatures more than gravel roofs did during summer afternoons. City planners have promoted such gardens as one way to ease heat on dense blocks of buildings. Because evaporation drives much of this cooling, the authors caution that the effect may be smaller in humid coastal cities, where the surrounding air can absorb less additional moisture. They recommend testing the same roof designs across climates before using the inland estimates in national building models.

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

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

• In 2012, biologist Keisha Morgan surveyed bird body masses at a single woodland site.
• Her team weighed every bird captured during a two-week banding effort.
• The mean body mass of adult song sparrows in the sample was about 20 grams.
• 142 of the 160 birds in the study had body masses under 18 grams.
• 9 of the 160 birds had body masses greater than 40 grams.

The student wants to emphasize how heavy the song sparrows were relative to other birds in the sample. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

A seventeenth-century poem is often called a translation because it follows the story of an earlier foreign play. The poet changed the characters, setting, and ending; the poem is a loose adaptation rather than a translation in the strict sense.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Economist Sora Vale does not treat the cases in which a pricing theory predicts poorly as reasons to discard the theory. Her papers often walk through these episodes at length before returning to the model’s core claims. Instead, she presents them as it.

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