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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 22)

Drill 22 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 22) 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
After a grass fire swept a hillside, a botanist counted far more seedlings sprouting in the burned soil that spring than in an ordinary year. The obvious explanation was that the fire had drawn in a flush of new seeds, blown or carried onto the bare ground, so that more seeds simply meant more seedlings. To check, she had measured the seed bank both before the fire and again just before that spring's seedlings emerged, counting the seeds present. The two counts matched: the number and kinds of viable seeds in the ground had not risen or meaningfully changed. Given that the soil held no more seeds than before, the heavier crop of seedlings ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must be due to a flush of new seeds carried onto the burned ground, since bare soil after a fire gathers many more.
  • B) probably owes more to unusually heavy spring rainfall that soaked the hillside in the weeks right after the burn.
  • C) shows that the burned patch itself must have held distinctly richer, more fertile soil than the surrounding unburned slopes did.
  • D) owes more to seeds already present sprouting at a higher rate than to any rise in seed number, since the counts held steady. ✓

Explanation: (D) The obvious rival explanation, that the fire brought in more seeds, was tested directly: seed counts taken before and after the burn matched, so the seed supply did not grow and the extra seedlings cannot come from more seeds. The same stock of seeds must simply have sprouted at a higher rate, so the heavier crop owes more to that than to any increase in seed number. The choice stays inside what the counts show. (A) credits a flush of new seeds, which the unchanged counts rule out. (B) invents heavier rainfall the passage never mentions. (C) blames soil fertility, but the tested alternative was seed number, found unchanged.

Text
Botanists once explained the heavy waxy coating on a desert shrub's leaves entirely as a response to drought, since a thick wax layer slows water loss and the plant grows where rain is scarce. Comparing populations across the shrub's range complicated the picture. Plants at high elevation carried just as thick a coating even where soil moisture was ample, and wax thickness rose with altitude, where stronger ultraviolet light also favors a heavier protective layer. Dryness and intense high-altitude sunlight overlap across the shrub's habitat, and the field data cannot separate how much each drives the coating. Because these two pressures overlap across its range, the thick wax coating ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) cannot be attributed to drought alone, since the coating grew just as heavy at high elevation where soil moisture was ample. ✓
  • B) shows that drought has no bearing on the coating, because such wax layers form in answer to ultraviolet light rather than dryness.
  • C) is driven mainly by ultraviolet light, with dryness contributing only a slight and secondary share of the total.
  • D) most likely results from a difference in the soil chemistry between low desert flats and high mountain slopes.

Explanation: (A) The coating was just as thick at high elevation where moisture was ample, and its thickness tracked altitude, where ultraviolet light is stronger, so dryness cannot be the whole story and intense sunlight is an equally live driver the data cannot rank against it. The choice revises the drought-only account without denying that dryness helps. (B) denies drought any bearing, contradicting the stated point that the wax slows water loss where rain is scarce. (C) ranks ultraviolet light above dryness, but the data cannot separate their shares, so that overreaches. (D) invents a soil-chemistry difference the passage never raises.

Text
To report what workers in a growing craft trade earn, an analyst drew only on salaried-payroll records filed by firms that employ such workers, then presented the average as the trade's typical pay. The payroll files were detailed and easy to total. But a large share of people practicing the trade work for themselves, taking jobs directly from clients, and none of their income passes through any firm's payroll, so not one of them appears in the records. Because the figure rests only on those the trade pays through a company payroll, its portrait of what the trade earns ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves that the trade's self-employed workers earn almost nothing worth recording beside the salaried counterparts whose pay the records cover.
  • B) is worthless for every use, because pay drawn from a payroll can never be compared with pay earned directly from clients.
  • C) likely misstates the trade as a whole, since self-employed practitioners earn outside any payroll and so could not be counted in it. ✓
  • D) probably runs too low mainly because the sample of firms it drew on was simply not nearly large enough to be reliable.

Explanation: (C) The figure rests only on income that passes through a company payroll, and a large share of the trade works for themselves outside any payroll, so a whole segment of earners is absent and the average cannot speak for the trade at large; the choice names that coverage gap. (A) claims the self-employed earn nothing worth recording, but they were simply not captured. (B) calls the figure worthless and incomparable, overstating a fixable exclusion. (D) blames the number of firms, yet the flaw is who falls outside payroll entirely; sampling more firms would still miss the self-employed.

Text
A microbiologist spread the same strain of bacteria across a set of identical agar plates and, onto each, placed a disc soaked with a plant extract at a different concentration. Plates given the strongest dose developed the widest clear ring where no bacteria grew; a middling dose produced a middling ring; a trace dose left only a narrow margin; and a disc with no extract left the lawn untouched. Every plate sat in the same incubator at one temperature, on one batch of agar, seeded from one culture. Because the cleared area widened step by step with each higher dose while everything else stayed the same, the widening ring of clearing ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) most likely reflects small differences in the incubator's temperature from one plate to the next during the run.
  • B) is plausibly tied to the plant extract rather than to the incubation conditions, since the ring widened in step with each higher dose. ✓
  • C) shows that the extract had no measurable effect, since a disc carrying none of it cleared as wide a ring as the others.
  • D) probably depends on the particular species of plant the extract came from more than on the dose that was applied.

Explanation: (B) The cleared ring grew wider with each higher dose while temperature, agar, and strain were all held constant, and a zero dose cleared nothing, so a fixed background condition cannot produce a gradient that climbs with the dose; the extract, which alone varied, best explains it. The choice ties the effect to the extract without calling it the sole possible cause. (A) blames temperature, but that was constant across plates and cannot vary with dose. (C) says the extract had no effect, contradicting the untouched lawn under the zero dose. (D) invokes the plant species, but only one extract was tested.

Text
A cataloguer studying an undated bound volume of sermons turns the leaves up to the light and finds, pressed into every sheet, the same watermark: a distinctive twin-tower device. Records of the paper trade tie that exact device to a single mill, which did not begin making paper until a well-documented year when it was founded and licensed. The volume's leaves are all of this one paper, with no later repairs or inserted sheets, so the book was assembled from stock this mill produced. Because a book cannot be written on paper that has not yet been made, the volume ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) can be no earlier than the year that mill began making its paper, since every leaf carries the mill's own watermark. ✓
  • B) must be older than the mill itself, because paper bearing so clear and well-cut a watermark takes many years to come into wide use.
  • C) can be dated to the exact year the mill was founded, since the twin-tower watermark fixes the book to that single year.
  • D) was most likely produced at the mill itself rather than by the scribe who copied the sermons into it.

Explanation: (A) Every leaf carries the watermark of a mill that began making paper only in a documented year, and the volume was assembled from that paper with no later inserts, so it could not have been written before the paper existed; it is therefore no earlier than the mill's first year of production. The choice states just that earliest-possible bound. (B) makes the book older than the mill, but paper made after the mill's founding cannot predate it, so the book comes later. (C) claims a precise year, yet the watermark gives an ordering, not a date. (D) guesses at where the book was written, which the passage never addresses.