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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 19)

Drill 19 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 19) 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
Researchers first attributed the deep red of a finch's feathers entirely to pigments the bird takes in from the seeds and berries it eats. Closer work complicated that account: birds raised on the same rich diet still varied widely in redness, and the brightest individuals were those whose bodies most efficiently converted a dull dietary pigment into a vivid red one through their own metabolism. Diet supplies the raw pigment, but the bird's own processing determines how red it becomes, and the two contributions run together in any wild finch. Given that two factors shape the color, a finch's redness ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) need not be credited to diet alone, since the bird's own conversion of the pigment also shapes it and the two cannot be separated here. ✓
  • B) is clearly set by the bird's metabolism alone, since the pigments it eats have no bearing at all on the color its feathers finally show.
  • C) shows that diet plays no part in the color, because feather redness must come from internal processing rather than from the food eaten.
  • D) most likely depends on the mineral content of the water each bird happens to drink while its new feathers are growing in.

Explanation: (A) Diet supplies the raw pigment while the bird's own conversion determines how red it becomes, and the two run together in any wild finch, so the redness cannot be laid to diet alone; the bird's processing is an equally live factor. The choice revises the first account without discarding diet as a contributor. (B) credits metabolism alone, but diet still supplies the pigment being converted. (C) denies diet any part, though the evidence shows only that its effect cannot be isolated. (D) invents a role for drinking-water minerals the passage never mentions.

Text
To inventory the fish on a coral reef, surveyors swam fixed routes and recorded every species they saw along the way. The dive counts logged many bold, roaming fish that ignore a passing diver. But underwater cameras left to run on their own, with no diver present, later recorded several wary species that dart into crevices at a diver's approach and so had gone entirely unseen on the swims. Because the divers could record only the fish that stay in view when a person swims near, the species list from their counts ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves the reef holds fewer fish species than nearby reefs that were surveyed by divers in exactly the same manner.
  • B) likely undercounts the reef's fish species, since fish that flee an approaching diver had little chance of being seen and logged. ✓
  • C) is useless for any comparison, because diver counts and camera footage record reef life in ways that cannot be reconciled at all.
  • D) probably reflects the divers' bright equipment attracting curious fish rather than any real gap in which species stay in view.

Explanation: (B) The divers could log only fish that stay in view as a person swims near, and cameras running with no diver present caught wary species that flee an approach, so a list built from the swims leaves out the shy fish and undercounts the total. The choice names that coverage gap. (A) ranks this reef against nearby reefs never surveyed here. (C) calls the two methods irreconcilable, yet the passage compares them directly. (D) blames attractive equipment, but the problem named is that shy species flee, not that curious ones are drawn in.

Text
On one common account of the public safety warning, such a message succeeds only when it tells its audience not just that a danger exists but what specific action to take in response; a warning that names a hazard yet leaves people with no instruction has failed at the task the form exists to perform. Consider a notice that vividly describes an approaching storm but never says whether to shelter, evacuate, or simply wait. If the account is right, then someone applying it to this notice should conclude that the notice ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) falls short of what that account treats as a warning's essential job, since it names the danger but tells no one what to do. ✓
  • B) succeeds as a warning on that account, since conveying the sheer seriousness of the storm is what such a message most needs to accomplish.
  • C) lies outside the reach of that account entirely, because a notice giving no instructions is not the sort of message it was meant to judge.
  • D) disproves the account, given that a description this vivid and alarming must surely count as an effective warning whatever the account demands.

Explanation: (A) The account makes a warning's success depend on telling people what action to take, and this notice describes the storm but gives no instruction, so by that standard it fails to do the job the form exists for. The choice applies the rule as given. (B) treats conveying seriousness as enough, but the account locates success in actionable instruction, so it reverses the standard. (C) says the notice falls outside the account, yet the account exists to judge exactly such cases. (D) claims the notice's vividness refutes the account, but vividness is not among its conditions and cannot override them.

Text
A floor mosaic of uncertain date shows, among its scattered everyday objects, a coin rendered in careful detail, down to the distinctive design that a currency reform introduced. Records fix when that reform first put such coins into circulation. The mosaic's coin plainly copies the reformed design, and no coin of that design could have been seen or depicted before the reform produced it. Since an artist could portray the coin only once that design existed to be copied, the mosaic ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was laid at nearly the same time the reformed coin first began to circulate widely through the markets of the region.
  • B) must be older than the reform, since its maker evidently drew on a coin design that the reform later chose to revive.
  • C) can be dated to an exact year, because the record of the coinage reform fixes precisely when the floor was completed.
  • D) must postdate the coinage reform it depicts, since its maker could only copy a coin design that already existed. ✓

Explanation: (D) The mosaic carefully copies a coin design that a dated reform introduced, and an artist could depict that design only after it existed, so the mosaic must have been made after the reform; the reform's date sets a lower bound on the floor. The choice states exactly that bound. (A) ties the mosaic to when the coin circulated widely, but copying requires only that the design already existed. (B) makes the mosaic older and has the reform revive its design, reversing the copying the passage describes. (C) claims an exact year, yet a copied design shows only that the mosaic came later.

Text
A biologist recording a pond's frogs found that the males' mating calls grew noticeably shorter in the breeding season after a highway opened nearby, and asked whether the traffic noise drove the change or whether calls were shortening among the region's frogs generally. A second, comparable pond with the same species and similar water conditions, far from any road and free of added noise, was recorded across the same season; there the calls kept their usual length, showing none of the shortening heard by the highway. Because the calls shortened only at the pond beside the new highway while the quiet pond held steady, the shorter calls ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) were surely caused by a region-wide shift in the way these frogs behave, since roadside traffic noise cannot affect how a frog calls at all.
  • B) are plausibly tied to the highway's noise rather than to a general trend, which the distant quiet pond would have shown too. ✓
  • C) probably owe more to a difference in water temperature between the two ponds than to anything about the nearby road traffic.
  • D) most likely followed from a change in the recording equipment the biologist used at the roadside pond partway through the season.

Explanation: (B) The calls shortened only at the pond beside the new highway, while a distant quiet pond of the same species held its usual call length through the same season, so a region-wide trend cannot explain the change, and the highway's noise is the plausible source. The choice ties the shorter calls to the noise rather than to a trend the control would also have shown. (A) credits a region-wide shift, the very alternative the quiet pond rules out. (C) blames water temperature, but the two ponds share similar water conditions, so noise is the difference the control isolates. (D) invents an equipment change the passage never mentions; the evidence is the contrast between the two ponds.