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

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 14)

Drill 14 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

0 / 5
←
Previous drill
Drill 13
Next drill
Drill 15
→
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 — current you are here
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 14) 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
Over one unusually warm week, a light trap set in a lowland field caught far more night-flying beetles than it had in the cooler weeks just before it. An entomologist asked whether the warm nights had driven the beetles into the air or whether some broad seasonal shift was simply raising insect activity everywhere at once. A second trap, placed in a nearby valley where the nights stayed chilly through the very same week, kept catching beetles at its usual low rate. Because the surge in flight showed up only at the warmed lowland while the still-cool valley held flat, the greater beetle activity ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is plausibly tied to the warmer nights at the lowland, which the cool valley did not experience. ✓
  • B) must instead reflect a difference in the bait, since the warmth was the same at both traps.
  • C) appeared at both traps together, which would point away from temperature as the cause.
  • D) cannot be linked to warmth at all, since one warm week is too little to show any pattern.

Explanation: (A) The lowland nights warmed while the nearby valley stayed cool, and only the warmed site's beetles surged, so the rise in activity is plausibly tied to the warmer nights rather than to a season-wide shift both sites would share. The choice draws that bounded causal reading from the valley contrast. (B) blames the bait, but warmth is the factor that differed between the sites. (C) says the surge appeared at both traps, yet only the lowland rose. (D) dismisses any link on the length of the window, but the cool-valley contrast is precisely what supports one.

Text
A surviving merchant's ledger was long treated as a purely practical record, read only for its columns of goods, prices, and debts. A fresh examination of its margins found short prayers, saints' feast days marked beside the dated entries, and pious phrases opening several of the yearly accounts, written in the same hand as the figures. The accounts are certainly real business records, but the margins show the writer folding devotional practice into the daily work of the books. Taken together, these features suggest that the ledger ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was never a business document at all, its columns of goods and prices serving merely to frame a private prayer book.
  • B) can no longer be interpreted, since the mixture of commercial and devotional writing leaves its purpose wholly unclear.
  • C) is best explained as a manual for training clergy, given the prayers and feast days worked through its pages.
  • D) served the writer as more than a plain account book, since devotional notes run alongside its records of trade. ✓

Explanation: (D) The columns are genuine business records, but the same hand added prayers, feast days, and pious openings in the margins, so the ledger carried devotional practice alongside trade and was more than a plain account book. The choice revises the old view without discarding the commercial evidence. (A) denies any business function, but the passage grants the accounts are real. (B) says the purpose is now unclear, yet the annotations sharpen the picture. (C) leaps to clergy training, which the merchant's working accounts do not support.

Text
To learn how a chain's customers felt about the company's shopping experience, a market team surveyed shoppers by calling numbers collected at the checkout counters of its physical locations. The responses came entirely from people who shop in person and were at a register to give a number. The chain also has a large base of customers who order only through its website and never visit a store. Because the survey reached only those who came to a checkout counter, its picture of the chain's customers ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) gives a faithful portrait of the chain's whole customer base, since in-store and online shoppers want the same things.
  • B) likely leaves out the online-only customers, whose views could not appear in a survey drawn from in-store checkouts. ✓
  • C) is useless for any conclusion, because checkout-counter surveys can never say anything about a chain's customers.
  • D) probably overstates satisfaction, since shoppers questioned at a register may feel pressured to answer more favorably.

Explanation: (B) The numbers came only from checkout counters, so only in-store shoppers could answer, and the chain's online-only customers never pass a register, so the survey leaves them out and cannot speak for the whole base. The choice names the coverage gap the passage describes. (A) treats the in-store sample as the whole customer base, but online-only shoppers are missing. (C) calls the survey useless for any conclusion, an overreach; the flaw is a specific gap. (D) invents pressure at the register, a bias the passage never raises.

Text
A lord's account rolls record a sharp rise in tolls collected at a town's gate in the year the town received a royal charter to hold a weekly market. A steward wondered whether the market drew the extra traffic or whether trade across the whole district was simply busier that year. The same rolls show that a nearby town without a market charter, on the same trade road, collected about its usual tolls over the same period, with no similar increase. Because only the chartered town's tolls jumped while the unchartered town stayed level, the market charter ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) plainly did nothing to raise the tolls, since trade throughout the district was clearly heavier that whole year.
  • B) lifted the town's tolls chiefly because a nearby fair, held there for generations, was cancelled that single season.
  • C) better accounts for the toll increase than busier district-wide trade would, since only the chartered town's tolls rose. ✓
  • D) probably mattered less than a bridge repair that same year, which for the first time let heavier wagons reach the town gate.

Explanation: (C) The toll jump appeared only in the chartered town, while a nearby unchartered town on the same road collected its usual tolls, so the charter accounts for the increase better than a season of busier district-wide trade would. The choice draws that bounded comparative conclusion without claiming the charter was the only cause. (A) asserts district-wide heavier trade, but the unchartered town on the same road was flat. (B) invents a cancelled fair the passage never mentions. (D) credits a bridge repair that appears nowhere in the text; the evidence given is the contrast between the two towns.

Text
To catalog the fish on a coral reef, divers ran their counts only during daylight, swimming fixed transects in the bright morning hours when visibility was best. Their lists filled with the colorful day-active fish that hover over the coral by day. A later effort that counted at night recorded many cardinalfish and squirrelfish that shelter in crevices during the day and emerge to feed only after dark. Because the daytime census covered only the hours when night-feeders stay hidden, its catalog of the reef's fish ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) likely undercounts the reef's species, since the night-active fish sheltering by day had little chance of being seen. ✓
  • B) records every fish species living on the reef, since a well-run daytime transect captures the full community.
  • C) is worthless for comparison, because daytime and nighttime reef counts can never be weighed against each other.
  • D) probably reflects the bright morning light drawing fish upward rather than any gap in when counts were made.

Explanation: (A) The divers counted only by day, when crevice-sheltering night-feeders stay hidden, and a nighttime effort later recorded many such fish, so a daytime-only catalog leaves them out and runs low. The choice names the coverage gap the passage describes. (B) treats the daytime transect as capturing every species, but the night-active fish were unseen. (C) calls the counts incomparable, yet the passage weighs day against night directly. (D) blames morning light drawing fish upward, but the flaw named is the timing of the counts.