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

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 11)

Drill 11 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

0 / 5
←
Previous drill
Drill 10
Next drill
Drill 12
→
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 5 questions → Drill 9 5 questions → Drill 10 5 questions →
Drill 11 — current you are here
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 11) 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 which mammals lived in a forest reserve, a team set motion-triggered cameras exclusively along the reserve's cleared walking trails, where footing was easy and the cameras were simple to service. The images captured many trail-following species, such as deer and foxes that routinely use open paths. Later fieldwork with off-trail cameras recorded several shy, dense-cover animals that had never once tripped the trail units. Because the first survey watched only the corridors that path-averse species deliberately skirt, its species list ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves the reserve holds fewer mammal species overall than neighboring forests that were surveyed the same way.
  • B) is unusable for any purpose, since trail cameras and off-trail cameras cannot be compared with each other at all.
  • C) likely undercounts the reserve's mammal species, since animals that avoid open paths had little chance of being photographed. ✓
  • D) probably reflects the trails' heavy foot traffic scaring off wildlife rather than a real gap in where cameras sat.

Explanation: (C) The cameras watched only the trails, which path-averse species deliberately skirt, and off-trail units later caught animals the trail cameras never recorded, so a list built from trail corridors alone will leave out the cover-loving species, undercounting the total. That is the bounded conclusion the choice draws. (A) claims a comparison with neighboring forests that were never surveyed here. (B) calls the record unusable and the placements incomparable, yet the passage compares them directly to make its point. (D) blames foot traffic for scaring animals off, but the problem named is where the cameras sat, not disturbance along the paths.

Text
On one traditional account of the verse riddle, the form succeeds only when a reader, given the poem's clues, can arrive at the intended answer without being told it; a riddle whose solution cannot be reached from the clues has failed at the one thing the form requires. Consider a short riddle whose images are so private that no reader has ever settled on its answer, and whose author left no key. If the account is right, then a reader applying it to this riddle should conclude that the poem ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) succeeds as a riddle on that account, since the very difficulty of its images is what the form most prizes.
  • B) falls short of what that account treats as a riddle's defining aim, since its clues do not let a reader reach the answer. ✓
  • C) cannot be assessed by that account at all, because a riddle with no recorded solution lies outside the form entirely.
  • D) disproves the account, given that a poem this inventive and strange must surely count as a riddle whatever the account happens to demand.

Explanation: (B) The account makes a riddle's success depend on a reader being able to reach the answer from the clues, and here the clues lead no reader to a solution, so by that standard the poem fails to do what the form requires. The choice applies the rule as given. (A) treats sheer difficulty as the goal, but the account locates success in solvability, so it reverses the standard. (C) says the riddle falls outside the account because its solution is unrecorded, yet the account exists precisely to judge such cases. (D) claims the poem's inventiveness refutes the account, but cleverness is not among the account's conditions and cannot override them.

Text
A town's records show that admissions to its weavers' guild jumped in the year the guild waived its steep entry fee for newcomers. A clerk wondered whether the waiver drew the new members or whether the town's crafts were simply expanding in those years. The same registers show that three other guilds, which kept their entry fees unchanged, admitted about the same number of newcomers as in prior years, with no similar jump. Because only the guild that dropped its fee saw a surge while the fee-charging guilds stayed level, the fee waiver ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is more plausibly the driver of the surge than a general expansion in crafts, since only the fee-waiving guild rose. ✓
  • B) clearly had no bearing on the surge, because interest in the town's trades was plainly climbing across the board those years.
  • C) probably mattered less than the guild's decision to relax its skill examination for applicants at the very same time.
  • D) drew the new weavers chiefly because a rival weaving guild in a nearby town had just closed its own rolls to outsiders.

Explanation: (A) The surge appeared only in the guild that waived its fee, while the fee-charging guilds admitted their usual numbers, so a general expansion in crafts cannot account for the jump, and the waiver is the more plausible driver. The choice ties the surge to the waiver without claiming it was the sole cause. (B) asserts a town-wide climb in interest, but the unchanged guilds were flat, which is the opposite. (C) credits a relaxed skill examination the passage never mentions. (D) invents a rival guild's closure that appears nowhere in the text; the evidence given is the contrast between the waiving and non-waiving guilds.

Text
At a settlement dug in clear layers, a distinctive incised pottery style appears whose surface design plainly imitates the pattern of a certain imported glass bead. That bead type is itself well dated from other sites, where it turns up only after a known trade route opened. The imitation runs one way: the pots copy the bead's motif in clay, and no bead copies the pottery. Since a potter could not have imitated a bead design before that bead existed to be seen, the incised pottery style ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) began at very nearly the same moment that the glass bead type first entered production at the other dated sites.
  • B) must be considerably older than the bead, whose makers evidently borrowed the motif from the established pots.
  • C) can be dated to an exact year, since the bead's known date fixes precisely when the pottery style arose.
  • D) must postdate the appearance of the bead it imitates, since its design could only copy a motif that already existed. ✓

Explanation: (D) The pottery imitates the bead's design and never the reverse, and a potter needs the bead in hand to copy it, so the style must have arisen after that bead type appeared; the bead's known date therefore sets a lower bound on the pottery. The choice states exactly that bound. (A) ties the pottery to the bead's first production, but imitation only requires that the bead already existed, not that both began together. (B) makes the pottery older and has the bead borrow from it, reversing the one-way copying the passage describes. (C) claims an exact year, but a copied motif shows only that the pottery came later and cannot fix precisely when.

Text
A district credited a jump in its students' math scores entirely to a new curriculum it had adopted that year. A closer look at the schedule showed that the same reform had also lengthened daily math class by twenty minutes, so students under the new curriculum also spent noticeably more time on math than the previous year's students had. The curriculum and the added minutes arrived together, and the available records cannot separate their effects. Given that two changes were bundled into one reform, the score gain ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was clearly produced by the added class time rather than the curriculum, which on its own changes nothing.
  • B) need not be credited to the curriculum alone, since the reform also added class time and the two effects cannot be separated here. ✓
  • C) shows the new curriculum to be ineffective, because any gain of this size must come from scheduling rather than content.
  • D) most likely stemmed from a change in how the year's math test was scored, which the district happened to revise that same year.

Explanation: (B) The reform bundled a new curriculum with twenty added minutes of class time, and the records cannot separate the two, so the gain cannot be laid at the curriculum's door alone; the added time is an equally live cause. The choice revises the district's claim without discarding the curriculum as a possible contributor. (A) flips to the opposite overreach, crediting the added time alone, which the same inseparability forbids. (C) declares the curriculum ineffective, but the evidence shows only that its effect cannot be isolated, not that it did nothing. (D) invents a change in test scoring that the passage never mentions.