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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 7)

Drill 7 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 7) 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 wander off the passage's point.

Questions & Explanations

Text
In a shallow lake that warms readily in summer, biologists recorded that a resident fish reached a smaller average adult size across several unusually warm years than in the cooler years before. They asked whether the warming was responsible or whether the fish were simply growing smaller over time for unrelated reasons. In a nearby deep, spring-fed lake whose temperatures barely rose during the same warm years, the same species held its average size steady. Because the fish shrank only where the water actually warmed, the change in size ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was certainly caused by the warming alone, which fully accounts for the smaller adults with nothing left over.
  • B) is plausibly linked to the warming, since the shrinkage appeared only in the lake that warmed, not the stable one. ✓
  • C) most likely reflects the shallow lake's changing food supply rather than its temperature over those particular years.
  • D) stemmed chiefly from the heavier fishing pressure placed on the shallow lake during the several unusually warm years in question.

Explanation: (B) The fish shrank in the lake that warmed but held steady in the nearby lake that did not warm, so the size change tracks the warming and is plausibly tied to it. The hedged choice matches that convergence. (A) makes warming the sole and complete cause, which one comparison cannot establish. (C) substitutes food supply, a factor the passage never measures and that the temperature contrast does not implicate. (D) blames fishing pressure, which is nowhere in the text; the evidence given is the two-lake temperature contrast.

Text
A portrait bears an inscription assigning it to a certain year. The sitter, however, wears a particular high, wired lace collar of a style that costume historians agree was not made or worn until at least two decades after that inscribed year. The paint layers, examined under magnification, show the collar was built up along with the face and dress as part of the original composition, not a later addition over dry paint. Since a painter could not have depicted from life a fashion that did not yet exist, the portrait as painted ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must date to the exact year written in its inscription, which remains the most reliable evidence available.
  • B) was surely begun in the inscribed year and merely finished, collar and all, a couple of decades afterward.
  • C) depicts a collar that the sitter must have owned long before such collars were generally available to anyone.
  • D) cannot have been completed as early as its inscription claims, and dates no earlier than that collar's introduction. ✓

Explanation: (D) The collar's style did not exist until well after the inscribed year, and it belonged to the original composition, so the finished portrait must postdate that style's introduction and cannot be as early as the inscription claims. The choice states that bound. (A) trusts the inscription, which the datable collar contradicts. (B) invents a begun-early, finished-late scenario the paint evidence does not support, since the collar was original. (C) has the sitter owning the collar before such collars existed, reversing the chronology the passage establishes.

Text
Researchers had long treated a songbird's regional dialect as a direct product of its habitat's acoustics, assuming the local soundscape alone shaped which song a bird sang. In one controlled study, nestlings from a given region were raised in sound chambers that reproduced the background acoustic conditions of their birthplace but were played recordings of a different region's dialect. On maturing, these birds sang the dialect they had heard, not the one typical of their birthplace's habitat. Because birds acquired a foreign dialect even while surrounded by their native acoustic conditions, the findings indicate that a dialect ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) depends on more than habitat acoustics, since birds learned a foreign dialect while remaining in their native soundscape. ✓
  • B) is fixed entirely by the acoustics of the habitat where a bird is born and cannot be altered by experience.
  • C) has less to do with what a bird hears than with the shape and size of its beak and vocal tract.
  • D) cannot be studied meaningfully unless the birds are recorded in the open habitat rather than in sound chambers.

Explanation: (A) Nestlings kept in sound chambers reproducing their birthplace's acoustics but played another region's dialect grew up singing the dialect they heard, so what a bird hears, not habitat acoustics alone, shapes the song. The choice draws exactly that bounded revision. (B) restates the habitat-only assumption the experiment disproves. (C) points to beak and vocal-tract anatomy, which the study never varied; the manipulated factor was the song the birds were exposed to. (D) questions the recording setting, but the chamber setup yielded clear results and the point concerns what determines dialect, not where it is recorded.

Text
An agency estimating a rural county's employment rate collected all its responses through an online form advertised on the county website, and reported a strikingly high share of residents in steady work. A reviewer observed that the online form could be reached only by households with reliable broadband, which in this county tend to be its wealthier, more consistently employed residents, while many out-of-work residents lack home internet entirely. Because the residents whose joblessness would lower the rate were the least able to answer, the reviewer argued that the survey's rosy figure was most plausibly a product of its ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) having been conducted in a season when temporary and seasonal hiring across the county was near its annual peak.
  • B) failure to gather responses from a large enough total number of the county's many rural households overall.
  • C) reliance on a channel that only broadband-connected, generally better-off residents could use, missing the jobless. ✓
  • D) use of question wording that pressed uncertain respondents into describing themselves as steadily employed.

Explanation: (C) The form could be reached only by broadband-connected households, which skew wealthier and more employed, while jobless residents often lacked internet, so the high figure traces to a channel that missed the very people who would lower it. The choice names that coverage gap. (A) blames seasonal timing, which the passage never raises. (B) points to sample size, but a larger count drawn the same way carries the same bias. (D) attributes it to leading wording, which is never mentioned; the reviewer's argument is entirely about who could access the survey.

Text
An army introduced a rule requiring soldiers to purchase replacement equipment out of their own pay, but by an administrative quirk the rule applied at first only to companies raised in one province. In the year after the rule took effect, desertion records show a sharp rise among those provincial companies, while companies raised elsewhere, still equipped at the army's expense, saw their desertion numbers hold steady. Because the increase fell on exactly the units the new cost burdened and spared the rest, the rise in desertions ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was clearly and solely caused by the new equipment rule by itself, leaving no other factor any role whatever in the change.
  • B) points to the new cost as a likely contributor, not necessarily the only one, since only the burdened units saw a rise. ✓
  • C) most likely resulted from some harsher discipline that was imposed that same year on the provincial companies alone.
  • D) reflected a general collapse in the army's morale that would have driven desertions upward across all its companies.

Explanation: (B) Desertions rose only in the companies the new equipment cost burdened and stayed flat in those still equipped at the army's expense, so the rule is a likely contributor, even if not proven the sole cause. The choice makes just that measured claim. (A) makes the rule the sole and complete cause, which the contrast cannot prove. (C) invents a discipline change the passage never mentions. (D) posits an army-wide morale collapse, but that would have lifted desertions in every company, and the unburdened ones held steady.