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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 9)

Drill 9 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 9) 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
To estimate how much carbon a grassland stores in its soil, a survey collected cores reaching only the top layer, the uppermost stratum where roots are densest. From these it reported a figure for the site's total soil carbon. Soil scientists noted that in these grasslands a substantial share of stored carbon lies well below the rooting zone, in deeper mineral horizons extending far past the depth the shallow cores reached. Because the survey sampled only the topmost layer and stopped there, its reported total ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) overstates the grassland's true soil carbon, since the root-packed top layer it sampled is the most carbon-rich.
  • B) is accurate for the whole soil profile, since the top layer holds essentially all of a grassland's carbon.
  • C) may instead reflect errors in how the carbon within the sampled cores was measured rather than any real gap in depth.
  • D) likely understates the grassland's true soil carbon, since the carbon held in the deeper, unsampled horizons was never counted at all. ✓

Explanation: (D) The cores reached only the top layer, yet much of the grassland's carbon lies in deeper horizons that went unsampled, so a total built from shallow cores leaves that carbon out and understates the true amount. The choice names that coverage gap. (A) says the figure overstates carbon, reasoning that the sampled top layer is richest, but the survey missed the deeper horizons, and leaving carbon out pushes the estimate down, not up. (B) treats the top layer as holding nearly all the carbon, which the passage directly denies. (C) blames measurement error in the cores, hedged but still never mentioned in the passage; the issue is the depth the survey failed to reach.

Text
A company promoting a transit app placed ads in the stations of one subway line but not in those of a second, comparable line serving a similar ridership. In the weeks that followed, downloads traced to riders of the advertised line climbed sharply. Analysts asked whether the ads drove the gain or whether the app was simply catching on citywide. Downloads from riders of the unadvertised line, tracked over the same weeks, stayed essentially flat. Because the rise appeared only among riders exposed to the ads, the increase in downloads ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was certainly produced by the ad campaign all on its own, which fully explains every last new download.
  • B) is more plausibly linked to the ads than to a broad citywide surge, since downloads climbed only on the advertised line. ✓
  • C) most likely reflected a citywide surge of interest that would have lifted downloads on both lines alike.
  • D) resulted chiefly from a recent change to the app's download price that happened to take effect during those same weeks.

Explanation: (B) Downloads climbed only among riders of the advertised line while the comparable unadvertised line stayed flat, so the ads are a more plausible cause than a citywide surge, which would have lifted both lines. The choice makes exactly that comparison. (A) makes the ads the sole and complete cause, which one comparison cannot prove. (C) posits a citywide surge, but that would have lifted downloads on both lines, and the unadvertised one was flat. (D) invents a price change the passage never mentions; the evidence is the two-line contrast.

Text
After a highway opened beside one pond, biologists recorded that the resident frogs gave shorter mating calls than they had before the road was built. They wondered whether the traffic noise was responsible or whether the frogs' calls were changing for reasons unrelated to the road. At a second, similar pond well away from any new road and free of added noise, the same species' call duration did not change over the same period. Because call length dropped only at the pond beside the traffic, the shortening ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was caused entirely by the traffic noise, which accounts by itself for the whole change in call length.
  • B) most likely arose from a shift in the ponds' available insect prey rather than from any noise along the road.
  • C) points to the road noise as the likely cause, since calls shortened beside the traffic but not at the quiet pond. ✓
  • D) followed chiefly from the unusually warm water at the roadside pond over the very season in which the highway first opened.

Explanation: (C) Call length dropped at the pond beside the new highway but held steady at a similar quiet pond, so the road noise is the likely cause, while the quiet-pond control argues against a change unrelated to the road. The choice makes that point. (A) makes traffic noise the sole and complete cause, which one comparison cannot establish. (B) substitutes a change in insect prey, a factor the passage never measures and the noise contrast does not implicate. (D) blames warmer water, nowhere mentioned in the text; the evidence given is the quiet-pond control.

Text
A surviving sermon has long been read as a purely devotional text, a call to private piety with no quarrel in it. Scholars recently examined a second manuscript copy in which the same sermon is surrounded by dense marginal notes that sharpen its phrases into pointed attacks on a rival faction's teachings. The notes are in an early hand contemporary with the copy, not a modern addition. The annotated copy suggests that the sermon, at least as some early readers received it, ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was read as carrying a polemical charge alongside its devotional surface, so a strictly pious account understates how it was used. ✓
  • B) was never devotional at all, its calls to piety serving merely as cover for what was purely a factional attack.
  • C) can no longer be interpreted with any confidence, since the two copies leave its real character wholly indeterminate.
  • D) was composed only to settle a doctrinal dispute, the pious language added long afterward by an unrelated later hand.

Explanation: (A) The devotional sermon survives in a copy whose contemporary marginal notes turn its phrases into factional attacks, so at least for some early readers it carried a polemical charge alongside its piety, and a strictly devotional reading leaves that out. The choice revises the old view without discarding the pious surface. (B) denies any devotional character, which the passage grants. (C) says the sermon is now uninterpretable, yet the annotated copy actually adds information. (D) claims the pious language was a later addition, but it is the polemical notes, not the sermon's devotion, that form the marginal layer.

Text
A chronicle purports to give a firsthand account written during a certain ruler's reign. In describing that ruler, however, it repeatedly uses a specific honorific title that, records agree, was first created and granted only at a later ruler's coronation, well after the reign the chronicle claims to record. The title appears throughout the original text, not in a few insertions. Since a genuinely contemporary writer could not have used a title that had not yet been created, the chronicle as written ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must indeed be the firsthand contemporary account it claims to be, its dating beyond reasonable question.
  • B) was plainly begun during the reign it describes and only later had the honorific title woven throughout it.
  • C) shows that the honorific title must have been in use long before any record says it was created.
  • D) cannot have been composed as early as it claims, and dates no earlier than that title's creation. ✓

Explanation: (D) The chronicle uses a title that was created only at a later coronation, and the title runs throughout the original text, so a genuinely contemporary writer could not have used it, and the work must postdate that title's creation. The choice states that bound. (A) accepts the chronicle as contemporary, which the later-coined title rules out. (B) invents a begun-early, revised-later scenario the passage does not support, since the title is original throughout. (C) puts the title in use before it was created, reversing the chronology the records establish.