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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 16)

Drill 16 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 16) 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
On a mapped region of a rocky moon, a smooth volcanic plain spreads across an older, heavily cratered highland, and in several places the plain's edge clearly laps over and buries the rims of highland craters. Crater counts confirm the pattern: the highland surface is pocked with impacts, while the plain carries only a sparse scatter of small, fresh craters that accumulated after it formed. Because a flow of lava can only bury a crater that was already there when the lava arrived, and the plain drowns highland rims rather than the reverse, the smooth volcanic plain ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) formed at almost exactly the same time as the cratered highland it now partly covers along their shared boundary.
  • B) must be older than the highland, since its sparse crater count shows it had far longer to weather smooth.
  • C) can be assigned a precise age directly, because the number of highland craters fixes exactly when the lava erupted.
  • D) must have formed after the cratered highland, since lava can only bury craters that already existed when it flowed. ✓

Explanation: (D) The plain's edge buries highland crater rims, and lava can only cover craters that were already present, so the highland and its craters had to exist before the lava arrived; the plain is therefore the younger surface. The choice states just that ordering. (A) makes the two surfaces contemporaneous, but burial shows only that the craters came first, not that plain and highland formed together. (B) makes the plain older and reads its sparse craters as long weathering, but a sparse count marks a younger surface and the plain overlies the highland. (C) claims a precise age, yet the evidence fixes an order, not a date.

Text
To gauge how a rural county's residents felt about a proposed water rate, a polling group sent its questionnaire only as a text message to mobile phone numbers, then reported the replies as the county's view. The method reached many residents quickly and cheaply. But a sizable share of the county's households, concentrated in its remote hollows, have no reliable cell coverage and rely on landlines, and none of them could have received a texted survey at all. Because the poll could only hear from residents whose phones receive texts, its portrait of county opinion ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves that residents in the remote hollows hold no clear opinion at all about the proposed change to the water rate.
  • B) is worthless for every purpose, because a survey sent by text can never be compared with one conducted by mail or phone.
  • C) likely misrepresents the county as a whole, since households without cell coverage had no way to be counted in it. ✓
  • D) probably reflects widespread distrust of unfamiliar text messages more than any real division over the water rate itself.

Explanation: (C) The survey could reach only residents whose phones receive texts, and a sizable, geographically distinct share of households have no cell coverage and were left out entirely, so a result built from the reachable phones does not speak for the whole county. The choice names that coverage gap. (A) claims the unreached hollows have no opinions, but they were simply unreachable by text. (B) calls the result worthless and incomparable, which overstates a fixable coverage problem. (D) blames distrust of texts, a factor the passage never raises; the issue is that some residents could not be contacted.

Text
Harbor records show that the number of ships putting in at a coastal town rose sharply in the years just after a lighthouse was raised at the mouth of its bay. A local historian asked whether the light drew the extra traffic or whether the town's arrivals had simply been climbing on their own for some time already. The same records settle that: for the two decades before the light, the yearly counts had held roughly steady, with no upward drift, and the rise set in only once the light was in service. Because arrivals turned upward only after the light appeared and not before, the new lighthouse ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) better accounts for the rise than a trend already under way, since the counts held flat until the light appeared. ✓
  • B) plainly had nothing to do with the rise, since the town's arrivals had already been climbing steadily for years beforehand.
  • C) most likely mattered less than the town's decision to dredge its harbor for larger ships in those same years.
  • D) drew the added ships mainly because a rival port down the coast had sharply raised its docking fees just then.

Explanation: (A) For the two decades before the light the town's arrivals held flat with no upward drift, and they turned upward only once the light was in service, so a rise already under way cannot explain the jump and the light better accounts for it. The choice ties the rise to the light without calling it the sole cause. (B) says arrivals had been climbing for years, contradicting the flat pre-light record. (C) credits a harbor dredging the passage never mentions. (D) invents a rival port's fee increase found nowhere in the text; the evidence is the flat stretch before the light and the rise after.

Text
A team studying a blind cave salamander first credited its greatly reduced eyes entirely to life in total darkness. A closer look at related populations complicated that story: surface relatives moved into caves generation after generation, and eye reduction deepened only across many generations of animals for which working eyes brought no advantage and their upkeep was a needless cost. Darkness and the long span of relaxed selection are bound together in these lineages, and the available data cannot separate their contributions. Given that two factors were entangled across the salamander's history, its eye loss ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was clearly caused by the metabolic cost of maintaining eyes alone, since darkness by itself cannot alter an animal's anatomy in any way.
  • B) shows that darkness had no role whatever, because such reduction must come from relaxed selection rather than from a dark habitat.
  • C) cannot be attributed to darkness alone, since the reduction deepened over many generations under relaxed selection in these cave lineages. ✓
  • D) most likely stemmed from a shift in the cave's mineral content that altered how the salamander's tissues formed over time.

Explanation: (C) The salamander's history bundles darkness with many generations of relaxed selection, and the data cannot separate the two, so the eye loss cannot be pinned on darkness by itself; the long relaxation of selection is an equally live cause. The choice revises the first explanation without discarding darkness as a contributor. (A) flips to the opposite overreach, crediting metabolic cost alone, which the same inseparability forbids. (B) denies darkness any role, but the evidence shows only that its effect cannot be isolated. (D) invents a change in cave minerals the passage never mentions.

Text
On one traditional account of the epigram, the short poem succeeds only when its final line delivers a turn that makes the reader reread the opening in a new light; an epigram whose last line merely repeats the sense of its first has not done what the form demands. Consider a two-line poem whose closing line restates its opening thought in slightly different words, adding no twist and asking for no second look. If the account is right, then a reader applying it to this poem should conclude that the poem ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) succeeds as an epigram on that account, since a restated close lends the short poem a satisfying sense of symmetry and completion.
  • B) cannot be judged by that account at all, because a poem whose two lines echo each other falls outside the epigram form entirely.
  • C) refutes the account, given that a poem this clean and balanced must surely count as an epigram whatever the account may require.
  • D) falls short of what that account treats as an epigram's defining move, since its closing line adds no turn that reframes the opening. ✓

Explanation: (D) The account makes an epigram's success depend on a closing turn that reframes the opening, and here the last line only restates the first with no twist, so by that standard the poem fails to do what the form demands. The choice applies the rule as given. (A) treats symmetry as the goal, but the account locates success in a reframing turn, so it reverses the standard. (B) says the poem falls outside the account, yet the account is offered precisely to judge such cases. (C) claims the poem's balance refutes the account, but cleanness is not among its conditions and cannot override them.