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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 29)

Drill 29 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 29) 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
An art historian studies a still life that includes, among its fruit and flowers, a small parrot of a kind native only to a distant continent. Records of trade and travel establish when that parrot was first carried into the region where the picture was painted; no image of it is known in the region from before that date, and it appears in local art only afterward. The bird sits in the original paint layer, worked into the scene from the first, not added by a later hand. Since the bird was unknown to the region's artists until its documented arrival, the still life ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must be older than the parrot's first arrival in the region, since exotic birds were painted from imported skins long before any live ones came.
  • B) can be fixed to the exact year the parrot first reached the region, since the bird pins the picture to that single moment.
  • C) was most probably painted by a traveling artist who had studied the parrot in its own distant homeland rather than locally.
  • D) can be no earlier than the parrot's first arrival in the region, since the painter could not portray a bird not yet brought there. ✓

Explanation: (D) The parrot appears in the original paint layer and was unknown to the region's artists before its documented arrival, so the picture can be no earlier than that arrival. (A) makes the picture older than the arrival, reversing the direction the bird sets. (B) claims a precise year, but a first-arrival datum fixes only an earliest date. (C) invents a traveling artist, while the passage establishes the bird was unknown locally until its arrival.

Text
A chapel fresco was long credited entirely to a single master. Close technical study unsettled that view. The confident modeling of the main figures matches the master's known hand in every documented work, but the stiffer background figures and the flat, hurried drapery show a second, plainer manner that recurs in the securely identified work of one of his workshop assistants. Both manners appear across the same wall, and conservators cannot cleanly divide which passages each artist finished. Given that two hands are at work across the single wall, the fresco ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was painted mainly by the assistant, with the master contributing only a few of the smaller and less prominent figures.
  • B) reads best as the work of two hands, not the master's alone, since a plainer workshop manner runs through parts of the wall. ✓
  • C) shows the master had no share in the wall at all, since the plainer workshop manner is what appears across its figures and drapery.
  • D) was probably finished long after the master's own lifetime by later admirers copying his documented style onto the chapel wall.

Explanation: (B) A plainer workshop manner runs through parts of the wall alongside the master's confident modeling, and conservators cannot cleanly divide the passages, so the whole fresco is best read as the work of two hands, not the master alone; the choice concludes about the wall as a whole without stripping the master of it. (A) makes the assistant the main painter, but the passages cannot be divided, so that overreaches. (C) denies the master any share, contradicting his manner in the main figures. (D) invents later copyists found nowhere in the passage.

Text
Below a dam whose release schedule had just changed, an ecologist measured a sharp rise in the number of insects drifting downstream in the current at night. The obvious explanation was that the reach simply held more insects than before. To check, she ran standardized bottom samples of the streambed both before and just after the schedule changed, counting the insects living in the gravel. Their number and mix of kinds were unchanged; the same density of the same insects occupied the bed in both periods. Because the resident population on the bed stood unchanged while the drift climbed, the greater drift ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) shows that the reach now holds far more insects than it did before the dam's release schedule was altered.
  • B) is probably best explained by a rise in the water's clarity, which let the observer see and count more of the drifting insects.
  • C) more likely reflects more insects entering the current than a rise in their number, since the streambed count held unchanged. ✓
  • D) cannot be read at all, since counting insects drifting at night is far too rough a measure to support any conclusion.

Explanation: (C) Standardized bottom samples show the number and mix of streambed insects unchanged before and after the schedule change, so a larger resident population is directly excluded, and more insects entering the current better explains a rise in drift over a flat bed count. Nothing beyond that is claimed. (A) says the reach now holds far more insects, contradicting the unchanged bottom samples. (B) credits a clarity change the passage never mentions. (D) calls the drift measure useless, ignoring the matched counts that make a reading possible.

Text
To gauge which animals are struck by cars along a highway, a survey drove the route each morning and recorded the carcasses it found, reporting the tally as the road's toll on wildlife. The drive logged many deer and other large animals lying in plain view. But carcasses do not all persist equally: a small frog or mouse killed overnight is often carried off by scavengers or scattered within hours, well before the morning drive, while a large carcass lingers for days. Because the count could catch only what still lay on the road at dawn, its picture of the highway's toll ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves that large animals are struck by cars far more often than small animals are along this particular highway.
  • B) likely undercounts the small animals killed, since scavengers remove their carcasses before the morning drive can record them. ✓
  • C) is useless for comparison, because a toll counted from a moving car can never be set beside one counted on foot.
  • D) probably overstates the toll, since a survey run only once each morning cannot fairly sample a busy highway's traffic.

Explanation: (B) Small carcasses are removed by scavengers within hours, well before the dawn drive, while large ones linger, so a morning tally systematically misses the small animals killed and cannot stand for the true toll; the choice names that persistence gap. (A) reads the count as showing large animals are struck more, but small carcasses simply vanish first. (C) calls the tally useless and incomparable, overstating a fixable limit. (D) blames the survey's general frequency, but the passage identifies a more specific bias: small carcasses disappear before the morning count while large ones remain.

Text
Planners estimated a city's daily commuting patterns using movement traces from a popular navigation app, treating the app users' routes as the city's travel. The dataset was vast and showed rush-hour flows in fine detail. But not everyone carries the app: it is far more common among younger drivers with newer phones, while many older residents, and most who commute by bus rather than by car, never appear in it at all. Because the traces come only from people who run this driving app, the resulting map of the city's commuting ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves that bus routes and older neighborhoods generate almost no commuting traffic worth planning around at all.
  • B) would likely be set right merely by gathering the same app's traces across a longer stretch of months.
  • C) likely skews toward younger drivers' routes, since bus riders and those without the app leave no trace in the data. ✓
  • D) is beyond any use, because movement traces drawn from one app can never be weighed against a traditional travel survey.

Explanation: (C) The traces come only from users of a driving app, who skew young, while bus riders and non-users leave no trace, so the map reflects one slice of commuters rather than the city; the choice names that coverage gap. (A) reads the gap as showing buses and older areas barely commute, but those travelers are simply absent from the data. (B) blames the time span, yet more months of the same app would still miss non-users. (D) calls the map useless and incomparable, overstating a fixable bias the passage presents as detailed.