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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 5)

Drill 5 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 5) 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
A leaf trait in a crop plant was long credited to a single gene, since plants lacking that gene failed to develop the trait. Newer work measured which genes switch on as the trait forms and found that several other genes become active at the same time, each apparently contributing to the result. Plants with a weak version of any one of these other genes showed a partial, muted form of the trait. Researchers add that the original gene still plays a clear role. The new measurements suggest that the trait ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) depends on several genes acting together rather than one alone, since weakening any of them mutes the trait. ✓
  • B) has essentially no connection to the single gene that was originally credited with producing it.
  • C) is in fact controlled entirely by one gene, just as the earlier account had maintained.
  • D) appears only in those particular plants that happen to be grown under one specific and unusual set of soil conditions.

Explanation: (A) Several genes switch on as the trait forms and weakening any one of them mutes the result, so the trait draws on more than the original gene alone. The choice revises the single-gene account without discarding it. (C) restates that older account, which the expression data complicate. (B) severs the trait from the original gene entirely, but researchers say it still plays a clear role. (D) introduces soil conditions, never raised in the passage.

Text
To gauge air quality across a wide river basin, an agency placed all of its monitors within the dense downtown core, where traffic and industry are concentrated. Analysts note that the basin also takes in farmland, wooded hills, and stretches of open highway, where the sources and levels of pollution differ markedly from those downtown. No monitors were sited in any of these outlying areas, and a single portable reading taken once in the farmland came back far lower than the downtown average. Since nearly every reading comes from one crowded district, the analysts conclude that the agency's basin-wide air quality figure ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) overstates pollution in the downtown core itself, simply because the monitors there sit too close together.
  • B) probably reflects conditions in the outlying wooded hills more accurately than those in the downtown core.
  • C) may not accurately represent conditions across the basin's varied outlying areas, which were left almost entirely unmonitored. ✓
  • D) is unreliable mainly because the monitors themselves were poorly calibrated when they were first installed.

Explanation: (C) Every reading comes from the downtown core, while farmland, hills, and highways with different pollution went unmonitored, so a basin-wide figure built from downtown may not fit those areas. The hedge matches a coverage gap. (B) reverses that coverage: the monitors are downtown, not in the hills. (A) says clustering overstates downtown pollution, but the issue is the unrepresented rest of the basin. (D) blames calibration, which the passage never raises.

Text
On one influential account of tragedy, a play counts as tragic only if the hero's downfall springs from the hero's own choices, not from accident or outside force; a ruin that befalls a blameless figure by sheer chance, on this view, is merely sad. In a recent drama, the protagonist is upright throughout and is destroyed by a random catastrophe she neither causes nor could have foreseen. The audience finds the ending deeply moving. Judged by this account, the play's powerful effect ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) may well confirm that the drama is a tragedy in the fullest sense the account intends.
  • B) shows that the upright protagonist must somehow have secretly brought about her own destruction after all.
  • C) proves that the audience members were not, despite appearances, genuinely moved by the play's ending.
  • D) does not make the drama a tragedy as this account defines it, since the protagonist's ruin comes by chance. ✓

Explanation: (D) The account requires a self-caused downfall, but the heroine's ruin is a random catastrophe she does not cause, so by that standard the play falls short of tragedy however powerful its effect. The choice applies the rule directly. (A) reverses it: a chance ruin fails the test. (B) insists she caused her ruin, which contradicts the passage. (C) denies the audience was moved, yet the passage says they found the ending deeply moving.

Text
For years a neighborhood's residents were mostly older adults, with few young families. The year after a well-regarded elementary school opened nearby, the share of households with young children began climbing steadily. A demographer notes that housing prices and the supply of homes stayed roughly steady across this period, and that an adjacent neighborhood with no new school saw no comparable shift in its age profile. With prices flat and the neighbor unchanged, the figures suggest that the influx of families ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was driven chiefly by a sharp and unusually sudden drop in local housing prices right across the whole neighborhood.
  • B) had in fact already been steadily under way for some time before the new school opened.
  • C) was plausibly linked to the school's opening, the one change while prices and the neighboring area held steady. ✓
  • D) occurred at essentially the same steady pace in the adjacent neighborhood with no new school.

Explanation: (C) The family share rose only after the school opened, prices and housing supply held steady, and the school-less neighbor saw no such shift, so the influx is plausibly linked to the opening rather than a broader change. The choice keeps to that cautious link. (A) credits falling prices, but prices stayed roughly steady. (B) places the rise before the opening, yet the climb began the year after. (D) claims the neighbor changed at the same pace, while the passage says it saw no comparable shift.

Text
After a province introduced a new levy on hearths, the rolls show unpaid tax arrears climbing in the years that followed. A historian examining the rolls finds that the new arrears fall almost entirely on smallholding households, the group the hearth levy newly burdened, while the payments of merchants and landlords, untouched by the levy, held steady. Other taxes in the province went unchanged in this period. The historian argues that the rise in arrears is most plausibly attributable to the smallholders' ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) longstanding, general reluctance to pay any sort of tax that the province happened to demand of them.
  • B) difficulty absorbing the new hearth levy, which fell on them alone while other groups kept paying. ✓
  • C) quiet decision to leave the province altogether rather than pay the sums that they now owed.
  • D) resentment at the far gentler way the province's merchants and landlords were being taxed instead.

Explanation: (B) The new arrears land almost entirely on the smallholders the hearth levy newly burdened, while the unburdened merchants and landlords kept paying and other taxes held steady, so the levy's weight on that one group is the plausible cause. The choice names just that. (A) blames a standing reluctance to pay anything, which would not spare the merchants or wait for the new levy. (C) attributes the arrears to departure, never mentioned. (D) makes the grievance the taxing of others, yet merchants and landlords were untouched by this levy.