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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 3)

Drill 3 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 3) is a Reading & Writing practice drill covering Hard Inferences. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

These hard SAT inference questions ask you to complete short academic passages by choosing the conclusion the text best supports. The right answer stays inside the evidence; the wrong ones tend to overreach, reverse the logic, or bring in something the passage never says.

Questions & Explanations

Text
When a transit agency cut weekend fares, weekend ridership climbed over the next two months, and its board credited the lower price. A reviewer is more cautious. Weekday fares were left unchanged, and weekday ridership over the same two months held flat, giving a baseline that did not move. The reviewer adds that the city scheduled no festivals or events in that window that might have drawn extra weekend crowds. With weekday demand steady and no special draw, the comparison suggests that the weekend increase ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) would very likely have occurred even if the weekend fares had been left exactly where they were.
  • B) was caused mainly by special festivals and events the city happened to hold on those particular weekends.
  • C) reflects a broad rise in ridership that was occurring across every day of the week alike.
  • D) is plausibly tied to the weekend fare cut rather than to any wider upward trend in ridership. ✓

Explanation: (D) Only weekend fares changed, weekday ridership stayed flat over the same months, and no events explain the bump, so the weekend rise lines up with the fare cut and not with any broad trend. The choice draws just that cautious link. (A) denies the link, but the flat weekday line shows no sign of a trend that would produce the rise anyway. (B) blames special events, which the reviewer expressly rules out. (C) claims a rise across every day, yet weekday ridership held flat.

Text
A circular crater on a volcanic plain holds a sheet of hardened lava across its floor. Geologists once assumed the lava and the crater formed in a single event. Isotope ratios in the lava, which record when molten rock cools and hardens, place its solidification well after the surrounding plain had formed. The lava sheet also laps smoothly against the crater's inner walls, filling a basin that must already have existed to be filled. These observations together indicate that the lava ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) and the surrounding crater were produced together in one and the same volcanic event.
  • B) hardened into solid rock long before the crater that now contains it had formed at all.
  • C) flowed into the crater only after that basin already existed to be filled by it. ✓
  • D) cannot be dated at all, because isotope ratios are notoriously unreliable in volcanic rock.

Explanation: (C) The lava hardened after the plain formed and lies smoothly inside a basin that had to exist before it could be filled, so the flow entered an already-present crater. That the fill postdates the basin is what the two clues fix. (A) restates the single-event assumption the isotope dates overturn. (B) reverses the relationship: lava filling a basin must come after the basin, not before. (D) calls the dating unreliable, a doubt the passage never raises.

Text
Excavators found a fossil skeleton resting in a sediment layer that lies directly above a bed of volcanic ash. The ash bed has been dated by laboratory analysis to a specific eruption, and the layers at the site are undisturbed, lying in the order they were laid down. The skeleton is complete and articulated, with no sign that the remains were carried in from elsewhere, so the animal was buried where it died, in sediment that settled on top of the ash. Since that sediment is younger than the ash beneath it, the find indicates that the animal ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must have died during the very eruption that deposited the ash.
  • B) died at some point after the eruption that produced the ash. ✓
  • C) was buried in sediment that had settled before the ash formed.
  • D) predates every other fossil so far recovered from the region.

Explanation: (B) The complete, articulated skeleton was buried where the animal died, in sediment above a dated ash bed, and an upper layer is younger than the one below, so the animal died after that eruption. The articulation rules out remains washed in later. The choice states just that bound. (A) puts the death during the eruption, but the remains rest above the ash, so death came afterward. (C) reverses the order: the sediment settled after the ash, not before. (D) ranks the fossil against others, a comparison the passage never makes.

Text
On one common account of parody, a work parodies another only if its audience can recognize the specific target being imitated; without that recognition, the imitation may amuse but does not function as parody at all. A short prose piece closely mimics the style of an older author, yet that author's work is now so obscure that, in surveys, almost no current reader can name or identify the model being echoed. Judged by this account, the prose piece's relation to its model ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) may fall short of parody, since almost no reader recognizes the target it imitates. ✓
  • B) effectively proves that the older author's now-forgotten work fully deserves its present obscurity.
  • C) shows the piece must fail to amuse the very readers who actually encounter it today.
  • D) may well still succeed as parody on this account, notwithstanding how obscure its model has become.

Explanation: (A) The account makes recognition of the target the test of parody, and surveys show almost no reader can identify this model, so by that standard the piece may not function as parody. The hedge fits a survey result. (D) reverses the standard: an unrecognized target means the work fails the test, not passes it. (C) says the piece must fail to amuse, but the account allows such imitation to amuse even when it is not parody. (B) judges the model's merit, which the passage never raises.

Text
Parish registers from a market town record a sharp spike in burials in a single year. A historian observes that in that same year the town reopened an old well that had earlier been sealed off, and that the recorded deaths cluster among households on the streets nearest that well. Registers from neighboring parishes, drawing their water elsewhere, show no unusual rise for the year. With the deaths concentrated by location and the neighbors unaffected, the records suggest that the burial spike ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is plausibly connected to the town's reopening of the old well that year. ✓
  • B) must have affected every parish across the whole region more or less equally that same year.
  • C) was most likely caused by a famine that struck the entire market town at once.
  • D) had in fact already begun to climb well before the old well was ever reopened.

Explanation: (A) The extra deaths cluster among households nearest the reopened well, neighboring parishes on other water saw no rise, and the spike falls in the year of the reopening, so the well is a plausible link. The hedge suits an inference from clustering. (B) claims a region-wide effect, but the neighbors show no unusual increase. (C) blames a town-wide famine the passage never mentions, which would not explain the clustering. (D) places the rise before the reopening, yet the registers locate the spike in the reopening year itself.