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

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 10)

Drill 10 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

0 / 5
←
Previous drill
Drill 9
Next drill
Drill 11
→
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 — current you are here
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 5 questions → 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 10) 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
Biologists had attributed the striking variation in a beetle's horn size to a single genetic locus, assuming that one gene governed how large the horn grew. In a series of controlled crosses, offspring horn sizes did not sort into the few clean categories a single locus would produce; instead they spread across a broad continuous range, and several distinct chromosomal regions each tracked part of the variation. Because the trait's inheritance implicated multiple regions rather than one, the results indicate that horn size ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is controlled by a single locus after all, exactly as the original one-gene account had proposed.
  • B) depends on more than one locus, since several chromosomal regions each accounted for part of its variation. ✓
  • C) is shaped less by any inherited factor than by how much food each larva happens to obtain while growing.
  • D) cannot be studied through breeding crosses, which are unsuited to traits that vary continuously in this way.

Explanation: (B) Offspring horn sizes spread continuously rather than sorting into the few categories one gene would give, and several chromosomal regions each tracked part of the variation, so horn size depends on more than a single locus. The choice draws that bounded revision. (A) restates the one-gene account the crosses disprove. (C) points to larval nutrition, a factor the crosses never varied; the evidence concerns inherited regions. (D) claims crosses cannot study such traits, yet here they produced clear, interpretable results.

Text
To gauge satisfaction with a new exhibit, a museum surveyed visitors as they departed through the main exit at the end of the standard route, and reported overwhelmingly positive reactions. A staff analyst observed that visitors who disliked the exhibit tended to leave early, and that early leavers overwhelmingly used a side door rather than walking the full route to the main exit. The side door led straight to the street, so those early leavers passed no surveyor on their way out. Because the survey reached only visitors who finished at the main door, its glowing result ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) likely overstates how positive the visitors were overall, since the dissatisfied early leavers exited elsewhere and so went entirely unheard. ✓
  • B) can be taken as a faithful measure of every visitor's response, so the exhibit plainly pleased essentially all who came.
  • C) was skewed principally by the exhibit having been surveyed before its final rooms were fully open to the public.
  • D) probably stems from too few of the departing visitors having been stopped and asked at the door.

Explanation: (A) The survey caught only visitors who finished at the main exit, while dissatisfied visitors left early through a side door, so those negative reactions never entered the sample and the positive result overstates overall satisfaction. The choice names that coverage gap. (B) treats the sample as representative of everyone, which the missing early leavers rule out. (C) blames unfinished rooms, never mentioned in the passage. (D) points to the number surveyed, hedged though it is, but stopping more people at the same main door still misses those who exited elsewhere.

Text
On one traditional definition, a poem belongs to the pastoral only if it presents country life as an idealized realm of ease and harmony, a serene refuge deliberately set apart from labor and hardship. A poem set among rural laborers dwells insistently on exhausting toil, failed harvests, spoiled stores, and the grinding poverty of its figures, and its bleak, unsentimental tone offers no image of rustic ease, leisure, or contentment anywhere across its lines. Assessed strictly against that traditional definition, the poem ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) clearly counts as pastoral, since any poem with a rural setting meets what the definition requires of the form.
  • B) perfectly fulfills that definition, because its unsparing portrait of hardship is the very idealization the form calls for.
  • C) escapes the definition's terms altogether, given that poems about labor were never the kind of work it aimed to classify.
  • D) does not qualify as pastoral under that definition, since it depicts rural hardship rather than an idealized rural ease. ✓

Explanation: (D) The definition makes an idealized image of rural ease the test for pastoral, and this poem shows only toil, failed harvests, and poverty, so by that standard it does not qualify. The choice applies the rule as stated. (A) treats a rural setting as enough, but the definition additionally requires idealization, which the poem lacks. (B) calls the poem's harshness the very idealization required, reversing the criterion. (C) exempts labor poems, though the definition is offered to classify exactly such works.

Text
After a bright streetlight was installed over one hedgerow, ecologists counting night-flying moths there recorded a marked drop in the number caught compared with the seasons before the light. They considered whether the light was driving moths away or whether moth numbers were falling regionally that year. At a matched hedgerow left unlit through the same seasons, moth counts held steady. Because the drop appeared only where the new light shone and not at the comparable dark hedgerow, the researchers concluded that the decline at the lit site was most plausibly a result of the ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) broader regional downturn in local insect populations that both of the two hedgerows were equally caught up in that year.
  • B) gradual loss of flowering plants along the hedgerow that had nothing to do with the newly installed light.
  • C) newly installed light, which coincided with the fall in moths at the lit site while the dark site stayed flat. ✓
  • D) changed weather over that particular season, which would have depressed moth activity across both hedgerows alike.

Explanation: (C) Moth counts fell at the newly lit hedgerow but held steady at a matched unlit one, so the decline tracks the light and is plausibly a result of it. The choice names that convergence. (A) blames a regional downturn, but that would have lowered counts at both hedgerows, and the unlit one was flat. (B) substitutes a loss of flowering plants, a factor the design does not isolate and the passage does not measure. (D) points to season-wide weather, which would have affected both sites alike, contradicting the steady dark-site count.

Text
A historian reconstructing the wealth of a rural district drew on its surviving tax rolls, which record each taxpayer's assessed holdings. From these the historian sketched a district of broadly comfortable means. Another scholar noted that the rolls, by their design, listed only landholding households, while a large population of landless laborers and tenants, who owned no assessable land, appears nowhere in them. In this district the landless likely outnumbered the landholders the rolls named. Because the surviving rolls captured only that propertied minority, the picture of general comfort ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) likely overstates the district's overall prosperity, since poorer and likely more numerous landless residents did not appear in the rolls. ✓
  • B) can be trusted as a full account of the district's wealth, the landholders it records standing in for everyone there.
  • C) was distorted above all by inaccuracies in how the assessors valued the individual holdings they did record.
  • D) probably reflects too small a number of the district's landholders having been entered in the rolls.

Explanation: (A) The rolls list only landholding households and omit a large landless population, so a portrait built from them reflects the propertied minority and overstates the district's overall prosperity. The choice names that coverage gap. (B) treats the landholders as standing in for everyone, which the excluded majority forbids. (C) blames assessment inaccuracies, never mentioned; the issue is who the rolls leave out. (D) points to the number of landholders recorded, hedged though it is, but the real gap is the landless residents the rolls never included at all.