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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 18)

Drill 18 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 18) 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 ecologist tracking a woodland beetle noticed that captures in its pitfall traps climbed sharply during a run of unusually warm nights. One obvious explanation was that the beetles had simply grown more numerous that season, so that more of them blundered into the traps. To check, the ecologist ran a separate mark-and-recapture estimate of the population and found it essentially unchanged from earlier years: the beetles were no more numerous than before, only more often on the move. Because the count showed no rise in beetle numbers even as trap captures surged, the greater beetle activity ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was clearly caused by a rise in the beetles' numbers, since warmth alone cannot make a woodland insect more active.
  • B) proves that warmer nights must make this beetle more active in every kind of habitat where it is found.
  • C) more likely reflects the warm nights than a rise in numbers, since a population count showed no such rise. ✓
  • D) probably followed from the pitfall traps being spaced more closely during the warm spell than in earlier years.

Explanation: (C) One obvious explanation for the surge in captures was a rise in beetle numbers, but a mark-and-recapture count showed the population essentially unchanged, so the extra captures reflect beetles on the move more often, not more beetles; the warm nights are the plausible source. The choice ties the activity to the warm nights without calling it the sole cause. (A) credits a rise in numbers the count directly rules out. (B) overgeneralizes to every habitat, well beyond this one woodland. (D) invents a change in trap spacing the passage never mentions; the evidence is stable numbers alongside surging captures.

Text
A scholar first classed a surviving book as a purely commercial record, since most of its pages tally a merchant's shipments, debts, and prices in a neat working hand. A fuller reading unsettled that label. Scattered among the accounts, in the same hand and ink, are short devotional verses and prayers copied out with evident care, not as idle margin-scrawl but as deliberate entries the writer meant to keep. The commercial tallies and the devotional passages sit together throughout the volume as one person's book. Given that the same hand kept both the accounts and the copied prayers, the book is most accurately described as one that ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) served no real bookkeeping purpose, since the devotional verses scattered through it plainly outweighed its scattered commercial tallies.
  • B) served its keeper as both a working account book and a place for private devotion, not as a commercial record alone. ✓
  • C) was written by two different people, since a single person would never mix careful prayers with the dry tallying of prices and debts.
  • D) was compiled long after the merchant's lifetime by an owner who inserted prayers among account pages he no longer had any use for.

Explanation: (B) The same hand and ink kept both the merchant's tallies and carefully copied prayers as deliberate entries, so the book served its keeper for working accounts and private devotion alike rather than for commerce alone. The choice revises the first label without denying the commercial content. (A) says the verses outweighed the accounts, but the tallies fill most of the pages. (C) posits two writers, which the shared hand and ink rule out. (D) invents a later compiler inserting prayers, though the entries are in the original hand.

Text
In a cliff of clearly stacked sediment, a fossil fish is embedded within a mudstone layer, and its delicate fins and scales lie undisturbed, showing the animal was buried where it settled rather than washed in later. Directly above that mudstone, and never cut into it, rests a bed of volcanic ash whose eruption has been dated from other exposures. Since a layer of ash settling on top of the mudstone must have fallen after that mud was laid down and the fish within it buried, the fossil fish ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) died at very nearly the same moment that the volcanic eruption sent its layer of ash drifting down onto the mud below.
  • B) must be younger than the ash above it, whose eruption evidently sealed the mud only after the fish had been buried in it.
  • C) can be assigned an exact age from the ash, since the dated eruption fixes precisely the year in which the fish was buried.
  • D) must be older than the dated ash bed, since that ash settled above it only after the fish was buried in the mud. ✓

Explanation: (D) The fish was buried in place in the mudstone, and the dated ash rests above that mud without cutting into it, so the ash settled after the fish was already buried; the fish is therefore older than the ash, since the burial must have come before that dated ash settled. The choice states exactly that bound. (A) ties the burial to the eruption's moment, but the ash need only have fallen sometime after burial. (B) makes the fish younger than the ash, reversing the order in which the layers formed. (C) claims an exact age, yet the ash shows only that the burial came earlier, not the year it happened.

Text
A company noticed that installations of its app climbed in one city during the weeks a poster campaign ran there, and asked whether the posters drove the installs or whether interest in such apps was rising everywhere at once. It had run no posters in a second, comparable city of similar size and demographics, and it tracked installs there over the very same weeks; that city's numbers held steady, showing none of the first city's climb. Because installs surged only in the city where the posters appeared while the comparable control city stayed flat, the poster campaign ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is a more plausible cause of the rise in installs than a broad surge in interest, since only the poster city climbed. ✓
  • B) clearly had no effect on the installs, because appetite for apps of this kind was plainly growing in every city at once.
  • C) probably mattered less than a price cut the company applied to the app in the first city during the very same weeks.
  • D) drew the new users mainly because a rival app in that city had just raised its own subscription price beyond what many would pay.

Explanation: (A) Installs surged only in the city where the posters ran, while a comparable city with no posters stayed flat over the same weeks, so a broad rise in interest cannot account for the climb, and the campaign is the more plausible cause. The choice ties the rise to the posters without calling it the sole cause. (B) asserts growth in every city, but the control city was flat. (C) credits a price cut the passage never mentions. (D) invents a rival app's price increase that appears nowhere in the text; the given evidence is the contrast between the two cities.

Text
A town's court records show that fines levied on one craft guild for selling outside approved hours rose sharply in the year a new market ordinance tightened those hours. A clerk wondered whether the ordinance produced the fines or whether the town was simply enforcing all its trade laws more strictly then. The same records cover a second guild whose trade the ordinance expressly left untouched; its fines for the year held at their usual level, with no similar rise. Because fines climbed only for the guild the ordinance bound while the exempted guild stayed level, the new ordinance ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was plainly unrelated to the rise in fines, since the town was clearly cracking down on every kind of trade offense that whole year.
  • B) probably mattered far less than a change in how the market's inspectors were paid, which the court records tie to the fines.
  • C) is a more plausible source of the rise in fines than a general crackdown, since only the guild it bound saw fines climb. ✓
  • D) raised the fines chiefly because a neighboring town had just abolished its own market hours, drawing sellers back and forth.

Explanation: (C) Fines rose only for the guild the ordinance bound, while a second guild the ordinance expressly spared stayed level, so a general year-wide crackdown cannot explain the climb, and the ordinance is the more plausible source. The choice ties the rise to the ordinance without calling it the sole cause. (A) asserts a crackdown on every trade, but the exempted guild was flat. (B) credits a change in inspector pay the passage never mentions, and wrongly claims the records tie it to the fines. (D) invents a neighboring town's action that appears nowhere in the text; the evidence is the contrast between the bound and exempted guilds.