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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 13)

Drill 13 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 13) 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 gauge how many invertebrates lived in a meadow's soil, a survey collected samples only during midday hours, when fieldwork was easiest. The daytime samples were rich in earthworms and beetle larvae that stay active in daylight. A follow-up that also sampled after dark recovered numerous springtails and predatory mites that retreat deep or stay still by day and move near the surface only at night. Because the first survey sampled only the hours when night-active soil animals lie low, its tally of the meadow's soil invertebrates ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves the meadow's soil holds a smaller invertebrate community than any nearby field sampled the same way.
  • B) likely undercounts the community, since the night-active springtails and mites were unlikely to be caught by day. ✓
  • C) is meaningless for any comparison, because daytime and nighttime soil samples can never be set against each other.
  • D) probably reflects the midday heat driving surface animals downward rather than any gap in when samples were taken.

Explanation: (B) The survey sampled only midday hours, when night-active springtails and mites stay hidden, and a nighttime follow-up recovered many such animals, so a daytime-only tally leaves them out and runs low. The choice names the coverage gap the passage describes. (A) claims a comparison with nearby fields that were never sampled. (C) calls the samples incomparable, yet the passage sets day against night directly. (D) blames midday heat driving animals down, but the flaw named is the timing of sampling, not a heat effect.

Text
A small hoard of undated coins carries, on its reverse, a clear image of a domed temple. That temple is independently known from building inscriptions to have been completed in a particular later reign; before then, no such structure stood on the site, and earlier coins from the same mint show only an empty plaza there. The coins in this hoard render the finished temple, dome and all, not a temple under construction or a bare foundation. Since a die-cutter could not have engraved a completed building that did not yet exist, these coins ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) were struck at nearly the same time the temple's foundations were first laid, well before its completion.
  • B) must be older than the temple, whose designers evidently modeled its dome on the structure shown on the coins.
  • C) can be assigned an exact year, since the temple's known completion date fixes precisely when the coins were minted.
  • D) must postdate the completed temple they depict, and so were struck only after that building stood. ✓

Explanation: (D) The coins show the temple already finished, and the temple was completed only in a known later reign, so a die-cutter engraving the finished building must have worked after it stood; the temple's completion sets a lower bound on the coins. The choice states exactly that bound. (A) ties the coins to the foundations, but showing the finished temple requires that it already existed. (B) makes the coins older and has the temple copy them, reversing what the passage describes. (C) claims an exact year, but the depicted temple shows only that the coins are later, not precisely when they were struck.

Text
On one common account of the public apology, the act does its work only when the speaker names the specific wrong committed and takes responsibility for it; a statement that expresses general regret while never identifying what was done wrong fails at the thing the apology is for. Consider an official who issues a warm, sorrowful statement about a scandal but never says what the wrong actually was or who was harmed, and never accepts responsibility for it. If the account is right, then a listener applying it to this statement should conclude that the apology ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) succeeds fully on that account, since the evident warmth and sorrow of the statement are what the form chiefly asks for.
  • B) cannot be evaluated by that account, because a statement about a scandal is a political act rather than a true apology.
  • C) falls short of what that account treats as an apology's core, since it names no specific wrong and takes no responsibility. ✓
  • D) refutes the account, given that a statement this heartfelt must count as an apology whatever conditions the account sets.

Explanation: (C) The account makes an apology's success depend on naming the specific wrong and taking responsibility, and this statement does neither, so by that standard it fails to do what the form requires. The choice applies the rule as given. (A) treats warmth and sorrow as the core requirement, but the account locates it in naming the wrong, so it reverses the criterion. (B) exempts the statement as merely political, yet the account is meant to judge exactly such cases. (D) says the statement's heartfelt tone refutes the account, but sincerity is not among its conditions and cannot override them.

Text
A lizard's shift to a darker skin tone was long explained by temperature alone, on the idea that cooler animals simply darken to absorb more heat. In one controlled study, lizards held at a fixed warm temperature still darkened sharply when a rival male was placed in view, and lightened again once the rival was removed, with no change in temperature at any point. Temperature still shifted color when rivals were absent, but it was not the only trigger. Taken together, the findings suggest that the lizard's darkening ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) responds to more than temperature alone, since the sight of a rival darkened the skin even at a fixed warm temperature. ✓
  • B) has nothing to do with temperature, which the study shows never affects the animal's color under any conditions.
  • C) is set permanently early in a lizard's life, so neither shifts in warmth nor the presence of rivals can alter its tone thereafter.
  • D) is driven mainly by the lizard's diet, the real factor lying behind both its warmth response and its social displays.

Explanation: (A) At a fixed warm temperature the lizard still darkened when a rival appeared and lightened when it left, so darkening answers to social cues and not to temperature alone, though temperature still mattered when rivals were absent. The choice revises the old view without discarding the temperature effect. (B) says temperature never affects color, but it still shifted color with no rival present. (C) makes the tone fixed early in life, yet it changed with rivals present and absent. (D) blames diet, a factor the study never measures or mentions.

Text
Port records show that grain shipments from a market town climbed sharply in the year a new canal linked it to the coast. An archivist asked whether the canal carried the extra grain or whether the whole region's harvests were simply larger those years. The records show that a neighboring market town, still served only by its old road and drawing on the same farmland, shipped about its usual amount of grain over the same period, with no comparable rise. Because only the canal-linked town surged while the road-only town held steady, the canal ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) clearly had no effect on the rise, since grain harvests across the whole region were plainly larger in those years.
  • B) probably mattered less than a sharp jump in grain prices that season, which drew far more grain to market.
  • C) is a more plausible explanation for the shipment surge than larger regional harvests, since only the canal-linked town shipped noticeably more. ✓
  • D) lifted the town's shipments chiefly because a rival port downriver had silted up and closed itself to grain traffic that same year.

Explanation: (C) The surge appeared only in the canal-linked town, while a neighboring road-only town drawing on the same farmland shipped its usual amount, so the canal is a more plausible explanation for the surge than larger regional harvests. The choice draws that bounded comparative conclusion. (A) asserts a region-wide larger harvest, but the road-only town on the same farmland was flat. (B) credits a grain-price jump the passage never mentions. (D) invents a rival port's closure that appears nowhere in the text; the evidence given is the contrast between the two towns.