📐 SAT
📝 ACT
🎓 AP Exams
About Contact Blog Privacy Policy

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 8)

Drill 8 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

0 / 5
←
Previous drill
Drill 7
Next drill
Drill 9
→
More Sat Reading Writing Hard Inferences drills
Drill 1 5 questions → Drill 2 5 questions → Drill 3 5 questions → Drill 4 5 questions → Drill 5 5 questions → Drill 6 5 questions → Drill 7 5 questions →
Drill 8 — current you are here
Drill 9 5 questions → Drill 10 5 questions → Drill 11 5 questions → Drill 12 5 questions → Drill 13 5 questions → Drill 14 5 questions → Drill 15 5 questions → Drill 16 5 questions → Drill 17 5 questions → Drill 18 5 questions → Drill 19 5 questions → Drill 20 5 questions → Drill 21 5 questions → Drill 22 5 questions → Drill 23 5 questions → Drill 24 5 questions → Drill 25 5 questions → Drill 26 5 questions → Drill 27 5 questions → Drill 28 5 questions → Drill 29 5 questions → Drill 30 5 questions →

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 8) 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
Marine biologists once explained a reef coral's color chiefly by its depth, assuming that the light available at a given depth alone set how the coral looked. In one controlled transplant, fragments cut from a single colony were moved to a uniform depth but seeded with two different strains of the symbiotic algae corals host. Held at identical depth and light, the fragments took on distinctly different colors depending on which algal strain they carried. Because depth was held constant while the algal partner varied, the results imply that a coral's color ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) depends on more than depth alone, since fragments at one depth differed in color with the algal strain hosted. ✓
  • B) is set entirely by the depth at which a colony grows and by the light that reaches that depth.
  • C) reflects the temperature of the surrounding water far more than either its depth or its resident algae.
  • D) cannot be assessed accurately unless the fragments are observed on the reef rather than under controlled conditions.

Explanation: (A) Fragments held at one depth and light but seeded with different algal strains took on different colors, so color depends on more than depth, with the algal partner clearly contributing. The choice draws that bounded revision. (B) restates the depth-only assumption the transplant disproves. (C) invokes water temperature, which the design never varied, since depth and light were identical across strains. (D) questions the observation setting, but the controlled fragments yielded clear color differences and the point is what drives color, not where it is viewed.

Text
A polling group gauged a city's support for a proposed rent-stabilization measure by calling numbers drawn entirely from a directory of residential landlines, and reported that most residents opposed it. A critic noted that in this city landlines are kept mostly by older, long-settled homeowners, while the younger renters likeliest to favor the measure rely almost exclusively on mobile phones and hold no listed landline. Because the poll could reach only the landline-holding segment, the critic concluded that its finding of opposition ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) accurately reflects the true balance of opinion right across the city, so the measure clearly lacks real public support.
  • B) was distorted above all by asking about the measure before its exact provisions had been made public.
  • C) likely overstates the true level of opposition citywide, since the sample reached older homeowners while missing the mobile-only renters. ✓
  • D) probably reflects the modest total number of residents the group was able to reach by telephone.

Explanation: (C) The poll drew only from landlines, which older homeowners keep while the younger renters likely to support the measure use mobile phones, so a sample missing those renters will tilt toward opposition and overstate it citywide. The choice names that bounded skew. (A) treats the skewed sample as representative, which the coverage gap forbids. (B) blames the poll's timing relative to the measure's provisions, never mentioned in the passage. (D) points to the number reached, hedged though it is, but a larger landline sample would carry the same tilt; the problem is who the frame could reach, not how many answered.

Text
On one standard account, a narrative counts as allegory only if its surface story supports a second, sustained meaning that a reader can decode element by element, so that the characters and events consistently stand for something beyond themselves. A dreamlike tale features vivid figures and shifting events that critics find suggestive, yet no reader has been able to map its parts onto any coherent second scheme, and the figures refuse to stand for anything in a steady way. Judged by that account, the tale ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) clearly qualifies as allegory, since its evident strangeness is exactly the feature the account treats as decisive.
  • B) does not satisfy that account of allegory, because its elements cannot be read as a sustained, decodable second meaning. ✓
  • C) lies beyond the reach of that account entirely, given that dreamlike narratives fall outside anything it was meant to cover.
  • D) refutes the account, for a work so rich in suggestion must be allegorical regardless of the conditions the account sets.

Explanation: (B) The account makes a sustained, decodable second meaning the test for allegory, and this tale's parts map onto no coherent second scheme, so by that standard it is not allegory. The choice applies the rule as stated. (A) treats strangeness as the decisive feature, but the account centers decodability, not oddity. (C) exempts dreamlike narratives, though the account is offered to judge exactly such works. (D) says the tale's suggestiveness refutes the account, yet being suggestive is not among its conditions and cannot override them.

Text
A large boulder of a rock type foreign to the area sits on the surface of a moraine, the ridge of debris left where a glacier once halted. The moraine's own deposition has been dated by the buildup of soil and weathering within it. The boulder rests atop the finished moraine surface, fully exposed and unburied, and no moraine material overlies or wraps around it. Since only a later pulse of ice could have carried such a foreign block and dropped it onto a moraine that already existed, the boulder's arrival ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) coincided precisely with the moment the moraine itself was first laid down at the glacier's edge.
  • B) long predates the moraine, which piled up around and over the boulder in a later advance of the ice.
  • C) can be pinned to an exact year, since the moraine's dated formation fixes when the boulder was dropped.
  • D) can be no earlier than the moraine it rests upon, and so postdates that ridge's formation. ✓

Explanation: (D) The boulder sits on the finished moraine surface with nothing over it, so the ridge was already there when the boulder was dropped; the moraine's dated formation therefore tells us the boulder arrived after it. The choice states exactly that. (A) ties the boulder to the moraine's initial deposition, but it rests on the completed surface, not its start. (B) makes the boulder older than the ridge it lies upon, reversing the layering described. (C) claims an exact year, but the moraine's age only shows the boulder came later and cannot fix the precise year it arrived.

Text
A town council imposed a new toll on the single bridge by which most grain wagons reached the town market. In the months after, the town's grain prices rose noticeably, and councillors debated whether the toll was to blame or whether grain was simply growing dearer everywhere that season. Records from market towns upstream, whose grain never crossed the tolled bridge, show their prices holding steady over the same months. Because prices climbed in the town behind the toll while nearby markets stayed flat, the price rise ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was undoubtedly caused by the toll alone, so that no other influence bore on the town's grain prices at all.
  • B) most likely followed a poor regional harvest that would have lifted grain prices throughout the whole area.
  • C) is plausibly linked to the toll, since prices rose in the tolled town while untolled markets held steady. ✓
  • D) reflected mainly a surge in the town's population that sharply increased local demand for grain that season.

Explanation: (C) Grain prices rose in the town behind the new toll while untolled upstream markets held steady, so the increase tracks the toll and is plausibly linked to it. The hedged choice matches that convergence. (A) makes the toll the sole and complete cause, which one contrast cannot establish. (B) blames a regional harvest failure, but that would have lifted prices upstream too, and those markets were flat. (D) invents a population surge the passage never mentions; the evidence given is the tolled-versus-untolled comparison.