Drill 23 · Reading & Writing · Hard Command of Evidence
SAT R&W Command of Evidence (Hard) — Drill 23 is a Reading & Writing practice drill covering Hard Command of Evidence. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.
Cities run warmer than the countryside around them, but why a given neighborhood is hot is rarely obvious. These items make you separate the heat a surface stores from the heat plants would have removed, and to read a graph for a difference rather than a level. The quotation item is an explicit-claim frame drawn from an 1895 novel; the rest turn on holding the right variable fixed.
A city agency finds that one district stays markedly hotter than a leafy district several degrees into the night, long after sunset. One reading of this is that the hot district's dark pavement and masonry absorb heat through the day and release it slowly after dark, so the nighttime gap reflects stored daytime heat bleeding back out. On a competing reading, the gap is really a daytime effect that the evening measurement merely catches late, with little actual nighttime release. The agency wants an observation that separates ongoing release after dark from a daytime effect lingering on the thermometer.
Question 1. Which finding, if true, would most strongly support the stored-heat-released-after-dark interpretation?
Explanation: Correct: The dispute is about whether heat is actively released after dark. Surfaces that stay warm and keep heating the air for hours past sunset are direct evidence of that ongoing release, which the daytime-lingering reading cannot produce. A: A bigger daytime gap that the evening merely matches is just what the rival daytime-lingering reading predicts, so it does not show heat is released after dark. B: Less tree cover may explain why the district is hot but not whether the nighttime gap comes from heat released after dark. D: Higher daytime peaks describe the day; they are exactly what the rival interpretation would point to, so they do not settle the nighttime question.
Sensors log air temperature every hour through one clear evening at two sites: a paved plaza and a nearby park. Both cool after the afternoon peak, but the team expects them to cool differently. They are interested in where the cooling stalls -- a flattening of the curve -- because a surface that keeps giving back stored heat should slow the evening temperature decline, while a surface that holds little heat should keep dropping. A flat stretch in one site's curve but not the other's would mark where stored heat is still bleeding into the air. The graph plots temperature against hour for both sites from late afternoon into the night.
Question 2. Which statement is best supported by the graph?
Explanation: Correct: A stalled decline shows up as a flattening curve, and after sunset the plaza's line levels off while the park's keeps dropping. That divergence in slope is what the graph establishes. B: The plaza, not the park, runs warmer after sunset, so this reverses the plotted relationship. C: This reverses the two sites: it is the plaza that flattens after sunset while the park keeps dropping steeply, not the other way around. D: The slopes differ after sunset -- that difference is the whole point -- so equal cooling rates throughout is not supported.
An urban planner argues that adding street trees to the hot district will lower its nighttime temperatures, reasoning that the trees will cool the air the way the leafy district's trees do. The argument assumes something specific about how those trees cool: not merely that they block sun during the day, but that they keep moving water into the air -- transpiring -- which carries heat away. For the planner's conclusion to hold, that assumption has to be true under the district's conditions.
Question 3. Which finding, if true, would most undermine an assumption the planner's argument depends on?
Explanation: Correct: The argument leans on the new trees actually transpiring, since that is how the planner expects them to cool the air. Soil so dry and compacted that the trees barely transpire knocks out that assumption, so the predicted cooling would not follow. A: That the species grows well supports planting it; it does not threaten the assumption that the trees will transpire and cool the air. C: How many species the leafy district has is beside the point; it says nothing about whether new trees in the hot district would transpire. D: Daytime shade is a separate benefit and does not bear on the nighttime cooling-by-transpiration the argument depends on.
In a literature seminar, a student argues that Stephen Crane's 1895 war novel opens by tying the appearance of the army in the landscape to the simple physical fact of daybreak -- as the cold and fog lift, the army is disclosed lying across the hills. The student wants the novel's first sentence, which links the retreat of cold and fog to the army being revealed.
Question 4. Which quotation most effectively illustrates the student's claim that the lifting cold and fog reveal the army in the landscape?
Explanation: Correct: The claim ties the army's appearance in the landscape to cold and fog lifting at dawn, and this opening sentence names exactly that -- cold passing from the earth and fog retreating to reveal the army stretched across the hills. It is the line the argument calls for. A: The river image is descriptive scene-setting and does not connect the lifting cold and fog to the army's appearance. B: This shows the youth's later confusion in motion, not the dawn moment that reveals the army. C: This recalls the regiment being feted on its way to war, unrelated to cold and fog lifting to disclose the army.
Table: four green spaces in the hot district
The agency compares four green spaces by how much evening cooling each delivers to the adjacent blocks. The table lists, for each space, its area in hectares and the total cooling it delivers in standard units. A council member wants the space that is the most effective cooler for its size -- the most cooling per hectare -- rather than the one with the largest total cooling, since a big space naturally cools more in total just by covering more ground. Answering means dividing each space's total cooling by its area and comparing the rates.
Question 5. Based on the table, which green space delivers the most cooling per hectare?
Explanation: Correct: Dividing cooling by area gives 1.2 / 0.4 = 3.0 for the pocket park, the highest of the four (greenway 1.5, garden 1.6, boulevard about 0.7). The pocket park is the most effective cooler per hectare even though its total cooling is the smallest. B: The greenway has the largest total cooling (4.5 units), but at 4.5 / 3.0 = 1.5 per hectare it trails the pocket park on the per-area rate the question asks for. C: The boulevard has the largest area (3.2 hectares), but that makes its rate 2.2 / 3.2 = about 0.7 per hectare, the lowest of the four. D: The community garden's rate is 1.6 / 1.0 = 1.6 per hectare -- respectable, but below the pocket park's 3.0.