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

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 17)

Drill 17 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

0 / 5
←
Previous drill
Drill 16
Next drill
Drill 18
→
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 5 questions → Drill 12 5 questions → Drill 13 5 questions → Drill 14 5 questions → Drill 15 5 questions → Drill 16 5 questions →
Drill 17 — current you are here
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 17) 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 catalog which insects pollinate a meadow's wildflowers, a team worked only in daylight, sweeping nets over the blossoms from morning to late afternoon and recording every visitor they caught. The daytime effort logged many bees and hoverflies busy at the open flowers. A later round of nighttime observation, using dim lamps, recorded a range of moths that carry pollen between the same blossoms only after dark and had never appeared in the daytime nets. Because the first survey watched the flowers only while the sun was up, its list of the meadow's pollinators ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves the meadow depends on bees and hoverflies far more heavily than on any of its other flower visitors.
  • B) cannot be trusted for anything, since daytime netting and nighttime lamp watching are methods that simply cannot be compared.
  • C) probably reflects the midday heat driving many delicate insects into shade rather than any true gap in when the team looked.
  • D) likely undercounts the meadow's pollinator species, since insects that pollinate only after dark had no chance of being recorded. ✓

Explanation: (D) The survey watched the flowers only in daylight, and later night observation caught moths that visit solely after dark and never appeared by day, so a list built from daytime netting alone leaves out the night visitors and undercounts the total. The choice names that coverage gap. (A) ranks the meadow's dependence on different visitors, which a daytime-only count cannot support. (B) calls the record incomparable, yet the passage compares the two rounds directly. (C) blames midday heat, but the problem named is when the team looked, not insects seeking shade.

Text
In a controlled trial, a researcher raised seedlings from one seed batch in trays kept identical in light and watering but given different measured doses of a mineral nutrient. Over eight weeks a clear pattern emerged: trays given the largest dose grew the tallest, those given a middling dose reached a middling height, those given only a trace grew a little above normal, and trays given none stayed at the ordinary height for that age. Because the seedlings' height rose step by step with the size of the nutrient dose, the greater seedling height ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was surely produced by warmer air reaching the trays given more nutrient, since a nutrient cannot affect a plant's height at all.
  • B) is plausibly tied to the nutrient rather than to light or watering, since height climbed in step with each dose. ✓
  • C) probably reflects differences among the seeds themselves, since the tallest trays were sown with a separate, faster-growing batch entirely.
  • D) most likely followed from a change in the watering schedule the researcher introduced only for the high-dose trays partway through.

Explanation: (B) The trays shared one seed batch and identical light and watering, differing only in nutrient dose, and the seedlings grew taller step by step as the dose rose, a graded pattern that light or watering held constant cannot produce; the nutrient is the plausible source. The choice ties the height to the nutrient without calling it the sole cause. (A) blames warmer air, but the trays were identical in their conditions. (C) invokes a separate seed batch, contradicting the single batch the trial used. (D) invents a watering change the passage never mentions; the evidence is the height rising in step with the dose.

Text
A short devotional text survives in a single undated copy, and a scholar wants to know the earliest date the copy could have been made. Throughout the text a certain river is called by a name that records show came into use only after the river was formally renamed in honor of a ruler, an event with a well-established date. No copyist could have written a name that did not yet exist, and the name appears in the body of the text in the scribe's own hand, not added later in a margin. Given that the copy uses a name coined only after the documented renaming, the surviving copy ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was written at almost exactly the moment the river's new name first came into official and everyday use throughout the surrounding region.
  • B) must be older than the renaming, since a scribe would naturally prefer the ancient name that the region had always known.
  • C) can be no older than the documented renaming, since its scribe used a name that did not exist before that event. ✓
  • D) can be dated to an exact year, because the record of the river's renaming pins down precisely when the copy was produced.

Explanation: (C) The scribe wrote a river name that records show arose only after a dated renaming, and a copyist cannot use a name that does not yet exist, so the copy must date to after that event; the renaming sets a lower bound on its age. The choice states exactly that bound. (A) ties the copy to when the name spread into common use, but the reasoning requires only that the name already existed when the scribe wrote. (B) makes the copy older and has the scribe prefer the old name, reversing what the later name implies. (D) claims an exact year, yet the name fixes only that the copy came later.

Text
A city credited a jump in new library-card signups entirely to its dropping the annual card fee that year. A review of the timing showed that the same month, the transit agency added a bus stop directly outside the library's main entrance, so first-time visitors also found the building far easier to reach than before. The fee waiver and the new bus stop arrived together, and the signup records cannot tell which change brought a given new patron in. Given that two changes coincided in one month, the rise in signups ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was clearly produced by the easier bus access alone, since waiving a modest annual card fee changes almost nobody's behavior at all.
  • B) need not be credited to the fee waiver alone, since a bus stop appeared the same month and the two effects cannot be separated here. ✓
  • C) shows the dropped fee to have been meaningless, because any rise this large must come from transit access rather than from cost.
  • D) most likely followed from a redesign of the library's website that made applying for a card online far simpler that month.

Explanation: (B) The same month bundled a dropped fee with a new bus stop at the door, and the records cannot say which drew a given patron, so the rise cannot be credited to the fee waiver alone; the easier access is an equally live cause. The choice revises the city's claim without discarding the fee waiver as a contributor. (A) flips to the opposite overreach, crediting bus access alone, which the same inseparability forbids. (C) calls the fee change meaningless, but the evidence shows only that its effect cannot be isolated. (D) invents a website redesign the passage never mentions.

Text
To estimate how many people lived in a market town in a given year, a historian turned to its surviving tax ledger and counted the names entered there. The ledger is careful and complete for what it records. But by the rules under which it was drawn up, it lists only the head of each taxed household by name, while the servants, apprentices, and lodgers who shared those houses were never entered individually at all. Because the ledger by design names only householders and omits the many others living under the same roofs, a population figure taken from its entries ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) likely undercounts the town's residents, since the servants, apprentices, and lodgers sharing those houses were never entered in the ledger by name. ✓
  • B) proves the town was far smaller and poorer than neighboring market towns whose own tax ledgers happen to survive from the same year.
  • C) cannot be used at all, because a tax ledger and a true population count measure things far too different to be set side by side.
  • D) probably overstates the town's size, since prosperous householders often arranged to have their own names entered more than once.

Explanation: (A) The ledger by design names only householders and leaves out the servants, apprentices, and lodgers sharing those houses, so a count of its entries misses many real residents and falls short of the true population. The choice names that coverage gap. (B) claims the town was smaller than its neighbors, but no other town is measured here. (C) calls the ledger unusable, yet it is a partial source that can still inform an estimate once its gap is known. (D) has the count run too high through double entries, reversing the direction of an omission that leaves people out.