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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 23)

Drill 23 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 23) 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
To describe the fish living in a reservoir, a crew set only wide-mesh gill nets across it for a week and reported the catch as the reservoir's fish community. The nets took many fish and were quick to haul and sort. But a wide mesh works by snagging fish of a certain girth: smaller and younger fish slip straight through the openings and are never held, however many of them swim in the reservoir. Because the survey could only retain fish large enough to be caught in that mesh, its account of the reservoir's fish ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves that the reservoir holds scarcely any small or young fish, only the larger residents its nets happened to catch.
  • B) is of no value at all, since a catch taken in gill nets can never be weighed against one taken in another way.
  • C) gives a size-skewed picture of the reservoir's fish, since the wide mesh lets smaller and younger fish slip through uncounted. ✓
  • D) probably undercounts the fish only because a single week is far too brief a period to net a reservoir fairly.

Explanation: (C) A wide mesh holds only fish of a certain girth, and smaller, younger fish pass through it untouched, so a catch taken this way cannot represent every size class present and the account skews toward large fish; the choice names that gear gap. (A) reads the absence of small fish as their scarcity, but they were merely not retained. (B) calls the catch worthless and incomparable, overstating a fixable selectivity. (D) blames the single week, yet the flaw is the mesh; a longer soak with the same mesh would still miss the small fish.

Text
A historian studying a rural parish tracks how many people signed their names, rather than making a mark, in the marriage register each year. In the decades after a charity school opened in the village, the share who signed rose steadily. The historian asked whether the school taught the new signers to write or whether literacy in the parish had already been drifting upward on its own before the school arrived. The registers answer it: for the two generations before the school, the share signing had held roughly level, with no upward creep, and the rise began only once the school was teaching. Because the signing rate turned upward only after the school opened, the charity school ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) most likely mattered less than the arrival of a new printing shop that sold cheap primers in the village those same years.
  • B) cannot have taught the new signers, since the share of parishioners signing their names had been climbing for generations beforehand.
  • C) was the only reason anyone in the parish could sign at all, so that no signatures would appear in the register without it.
  • D) better accounts for the rise in signatures than a trend already under way, since the share signing held level until the school opened. ✓

Explanation: (D) For the two generations before the school the share signing held level with no upward creep, and it began rising only once the school was teaching, so a literacy trend already under way cannot explain the increase and the school better fits the timing. The choice ties the rise to the school without making it the only source of literacy. (A) credits a printing shop the passage never mentions. (B) says signing had climbed for generations, contradicting the flat pre-school record. (C) makes the school the sole source of all writing, but the register shows some signed before and the evidence speaks only to the rise.

Text
Editors long assigned an anonymous medieval poem to a single northern scribe, reading its spellings as the plain record of one regional dialect. A closer study of its language unsettled that view. Alongside the northern forms, the poem carries a scatter of spellings and word choices native to a quite different southern region, and these appear too regularly, and in too many lines, to be stray slips of the pen. The northern and southern layers are interwoven throughout the text, and the evidence cannot show whether one scribe knew both or a later hand overlaid the second. Because forms from two regions run through the poem together, its language ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) reflects mainly the southern region, with the northern forms amounting to no more than a thin and incidental overlay.
  • B) cannot be assigned to the northern dialect alone, since southern spellings and word choices recur too regularly through the poem to be slips. ✓
  • C) shows the northern forms to be meaningless, since a poem carrying southern spellings must belong wholly to the south.
  • D) most likely records a spoken dialect that had died out well before the poem was ever committed to writing.

Explanation: (B) Southern spellings and word choices recur too often and in too many lines to be slips, and they run alongside the northern forms throughout, so the poem's language cannot be pinned to the northern dialect by itself; a second regional layer is genuinely present. The choice revises the single-dialect reading without erasing the northern forms. (A) makes the poem mainly southern, but the evidence cannot rank the two interwoven layers. (C) denies the northern forms any weight, contradicting their pervasive presence. (D) invents an extinct spoken dialect the passage never raises.

Text
On one account of how a penalty deters, a rule discourages an act only if those it targets know before acting what penalty attaches to it; a penalty kept unpublished, learned of only after the act, may punish an offender but cannot have steered the choice that led there. Consider a town that quietly adopts a stiff fine for a certain kind of dumping but never posts, prints, or otherwise makes it known. A resident who dumps before any notice of the fine has appeared learns of it only when cited. If the account is right, a reader applying it to this resident should conclude that the unpublished fine ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) cannot have deterred this resident in the way the account describes, since no notice of the fine had appeared before the dumping. ✓
  • B) deters the dumping especially well, because a penalty first revealed at the moment of citation lands with the greatest possible force.
  • C) cannot be judged by the account at all, since a fine that residents happen to dislike falls outside the kind of penalty it weighs.
  • D) still deters as the account requires, given that any fine heavy enough to sting will discourage the act whether or not it was announced.

Explanation: (A) The account makes a penalty deter only if those it targets know of it before acting, and here no notice of the fine had appeared, so this resident could not have weighed it when choosing to dump; by that standard it cannot have deterred this resident. The choice applies the rule as given. (B) says a penalty revealed at citation deters strongly, but the account requires foreknowledge, so it reverses the standard. (C) places the case outside the account, yet the account is meant to weigh just such penalties. (D) claims a heavy fine deters whether or not announced, contradicting the account's condition of prior knowledge.

Text
A clinic found that the number of patients missing their appointments dropped over several months. During those months the clinic had begun sending each patient a text-message reminder the day before, and an administrator wondered whether the reminders cut the no-shows or whether patients across the area were simply keeping appointments better that season. A nearby clinic of similar size, patient mix, and neighborhood, which sent no reminders, offered a comparison: over the same months its no-show rate held steady, showing none of the drop. Because only the clinic sending reminders saw missed appointments fall, the reminder texts ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) most likely mattered rather less than the clinic's own move to offer more evening appointment slots over those same few months.
  • B) clearly made no real difference at all, since missed appointments had already been steadily falling at both clinics for a good while beforehand.
  • C) are a more plausible cause of the drop in missed appointments than a seasonal upturn, since only that clinic saw the fall. ✓
  • D) cut the no-shows chiefly because the comparison clinic served patients who happened to live much farther from regular care.

Explanation: (C) Missed appointments fell only at the clinic sending reminders, while a matched clinic with no reminders held steady over the same months, so a season-wide improvement in keeping appointments cannot explain a drop confined to one clinic, and the reminders better fit the pattern. The choice ties the fall to the reminders without calling it the sole cause. (A) credits an evening-slot change the passage never mentions. (B) says no-shows had been falling at both clinics, contradicting the steady comparison. (D) blames a distance gap, but the clinics were matched on neighborhood, so that was held constant.