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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 2)

Drill 2 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 2) 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 bring in something the passage never says.

Questions & Explanations

Text
Researchers studied the gut microbes of a migratory songbird, whose communities are known to shift between its breeding and wintering grounds. To separate the effect of diet from the effects of climate and migration itself, they kept two groups of the birds in identical indoor enclosures at the same temperature and on the same daylight schedule, feeding one group the insects typical of the breeding season and the other the berries typical of winter. After several weeks the two groups' gut communities differed as sharply as wild birds' do across the seasons. Because the birds never migrated and shared a climate, the results suggest that the seasonal change in their gut microbes ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) takes place only when the birds actually undertake their long twice-yearly migration between the two regions.
  • B) is governed chiefly by the seasonal temperature each group experiences, rather than by anything in the food they are given.
  • C) can be driven by diet alone, since the penned birds shifted on food differences without migrating or changing climate. ✓
  • D) vanishes almost entirely once the birds are removed from the wild and housed together in identical indoor enclosures.

Explanation: (C) The two groups shared temperature, daylight, and enclosure and never migrated, differing only in diet, yet their gut communities diverged as sharply as wild birds' do across seasons, so diet alone can produce the shift. The choice claims exactly that. (A) is ruled out by the design: the penned birds never migrated and still diverged. (B) names temperature, but both groups were held at the same temperature, so it was controlled out. (D) says the shift vanishes indoors, yet the indoor groups are precisely where the sharp divergence appeared.

Text
A devotional hymn was long assigned to a monastery's earliest years, partly because its language is archaic and its melody simple. The hymn, however, is addressed to a particular feast day, and church records establish that this feast was not added to the calendar until well over a century after the monastery was founded. The same records show the feast was observed continuously from its introduction onward. Since a hymn written for a feast cannot predate the feast it celebrates, scholars now conclude that the hymn ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) cannot be older than the introduction of the feast it addresses, whatever its archaic language suggests. ✓
  • B) must belong to the monastery's earliest years after all, as its archaic style had long suggested.
  • C) was likely set to its simple melody well before the words addressed to the feast were written.
  • D) cannot be assigned even an approximate date on the basis of the evidence now available.

Explanation: (A) A hymn addressed to a feast cannot have been written before that feast existed, and the records fix the feast's introduction over a century after the founding, so the hymn must be no older than that, whatever its archaic style suggests. The choice states just that bound. (B) places it in the founding years, which the feast's later date rules out. (C) invents a separate history for melody and words, never raised in the passage, and the dating turns on the feast. (D) overstates the uncertainty, since the feast's introduction gives a firm earliest date.

Text
The bright ring system of a giant planet was once assumed to be as old as the planet, formed from the same primordial debris. Instruments later measured the rings' total mass and found it surprisingly small. Researchers note that the rings are almost pure ice, that a steady rain of dark interplanetary dust continually falls onto them, and that so little material could not have stayed bright while collecting that dust across the planet's multi-billion-year history. Some caution that the infall rate is hard to pin down. Still, the mass measurement suggests that the rings ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) may be entirely free of the dark interplanetary material that would otherwise settle onto them over time.
  • B) may be considerably younger than the planet, rather than a remnant of its primordial debris. ✓
  • C) stay bright only because the falling dark dust is somehow swept away as fast as it arrives.
  • D) formed at the same early time as the planet, out of the same primordial cloud of debris.

Explanation: (B) Pure-ice rings of such small mass could not have stayed bright while collecting dark dust for billions of years, so their clean ice points to a far shorter exposure than the planet's age. The hedge matches evidence the passage itself calls uncertain. (D) restates the primordial assumption the low mass argues against. (A) says no dark material settles on them, but the passage states dust falls steadily; their brightness reflects youth, not immunity. (C) invents a sweeping-away process the passage never mentions and treats the dust as harmless.

Text
After a kingdom reduced the silver in its coins, the recorded prices of grain and cloth rose over the following years, and chroniclers blamed the debasement for the hardship. A historian examining the account books notes two further patterns. Prices climbed by far more than the share of silver the coins had lost, and wages, fixed by the trade guilds, barely moved while prices ran ahead of them. The historian cautions that several pressures can lift prices at once. The evidence therefore suggests that the debasement ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) had no real effect on prices at all, which must have risen for reasons entirely unrelated to the coinage.
  • B) raised prices by precisely the same proportion as the share of silver removed from each coin.
  • C) was deliberately undertaken by the crown in order to relieve the very hardship the chroniclers describe.
  • D) need not have been the sole cause of a price rise that outran the silver actually lost. ✓

Explanation: (D) Prices rose after the coinage was weakened, but by far more than the lost silver explains, while fixed wages lagged and the historian warns several pressures can lift prices at once, so debasement need not be the whole story. The choice keeps to that caution. (B) claims an exact proportional rise, which the text rules out. (A) denies any effect, though prices did rise and the chroniclers tied the two together. (C) supplies a royal motive the passage never raises; the reasoning is about what the price record shows.

Text
Restaurant owners have long assumed that the size of a tip mainly reflects how good the service was. Analysts examined thousands of card receipts from one chain, each linked to a record of the weather and the time of day. They found that tip percentages rose on sunny afternoons and fell late at night, and that these patterns held even among tables served by the same waiters on different shifts. The analysts grant that service quality surely matters too. Taken together, the receipts suggest that the size of a tip ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is determined almost entirely by how good the service at a given table happens to be.
  • B) bears essentially no relationship to how well a given table is actually served.
  • C) responds to conditions like weather and time of day, not to service quality alone. ✓
  • D) rises fairly reliably whenever the restaurant decides to raise the prices listed on its menu.

Explanation: (C) Tips varied with sunshine and the hour even for the same waiters across shifts, so something beyond service quality shapes them. The choice revises the old view without denying that service matters, which the analysts grant. (A) restates the service-only assumption the patterns complicate. (B) overshoots by severing tips from service entirely, though the analysts say service still counts. (D) brings in menu prices, which the passage never mentions; the evidence concerns weather and time of day.