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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 25)

Drill 25 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 25) 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
Measuring a star night after night, an astronomer records its brightness rising and falling in a regular way. The obvious worry was that the changes came not from the star but from the sky: haze and air turbulence can make any star seem to flicker from one night to the next. To check, she measured several steady comparison stars in the same field of view on the very same nights, reasoning that shifting sky conditions would dim or brighten them all together. Those comparison stars held constant while the target went on varying. Because the neighboring stars stayed steady through the same nights, the target's changing brightness ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must come from haze and turbulence in the air, since any star will appear to flicker as the night's sky conditions change.
  • B) probably arises from a faint companion star that periodically passes directly in front of the target and dims it for a time.
  • C) more likely reflects real variation in the target than shifting sky conditions, since nearby comparison stars held steady on those nights. ✓
  • D) most likely traces to a slow drift in the telescope's own focus over the long course of each night's observing.

Explanation: (C) The obvious rival, that the sky rather than the target produced the changes, was tested directly: steady comparison stars in the same field on the same nights would have flickered too if haze or turbulence were the cause, yet they held constant while the target varied, so the variation is real and belongs to the target, not the sky. The choice stays with the evidence without claiming to know its mechanism. (A) blames haze and turbulence, which the steady comparison stars rule out. (B) invents a companion star the passage never raises. (D) blames focus drift, but that too would have moved the comparison stars, which held steady.

Text
On one view of poetic translation, a version succeeds only if it carries over the poem's central image into the new language, even where doing so means departing from a word-for-word rendering; a translation faithful to every single word but blurring that central image has failed at the task the view sets. Consider a translation of a short poem built around one vivid image of a frozen river, which renders each word precisely yet, in doing so, dissolves the frozen river into a vague picture of cold weather. If the view is right, a reader applying it to this translation should conclude that the translation ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) fails at what the view asks, since it preserves each word yet lets the poem's central image of the frozen river dissolve. ✓
  • B) succeeds by the view's own measure, because rendering every single word precisely is exactly the fidelity the view most prizes.
  • C) cannot be judged by the view at all, since a poem built around a single image lies outside the work the view covers.
  • D) still meets what the view requires, given that any translation keeping the original's words has done what the view chiefly demands.

Explanation: (A) The view makes a translation succeed only if it carries over the poem's central image, even at the cost of literal wording, and here the version keeps every word but lets the frozen-river image dissolve into vague cold, so by that standard it fails at its task. The choice applies the rule as given. (B) treats precise wording as the goal, but the view ranks the central image above word-for-word fidelity, so it reverses the standard. (C) places the poem outside the view, yet the view exists to judge just such cases. (D) says keeping the words satisfies the view, contradicting its central demand for the image.

Text
An undated star chart, drawn to show the fixed stars of one region of the sky, includes a bright star marked at a spot where older charts show none. Chronicles of astronomy record that a brilliant new star, a nova, flared into view at exactly that position in a documented year and then slowly faded; before that year, nothing shone there. The chart plainly renders the sky with this new star present and bright, and the mark for it is in the same ink and hand as the surrounding stars, with no sign of later insertion. Because a chart cannot show a star that has not yet appeared, the star chart ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must be older than the new star's appearance, because a chart this carefully finished can only record a sky already long familiar.
  • B) can be dated to the exact year the new star flared, since that star pins the chart to that single year.
  • C) was most likely copied from an older chart to which the new star was added later by a different hand.
  • D) must have been drawn no earlier than the year that new star appeared, since it shows a star absent from the sky before then. ✓

Explanation: (D) The chart shows a bright star where older charts show none, and chronicles date a nova's appearance at that spot to a documented year, with nothing there before, so the chart could not have been drawn until that star existed; it is therefore no earlier than that year. The choice states just that earliest-possible bound. (A) makes the chart older, but a chart depicting the new star cannot predate it. (B) claims a precise year, yet the nova gives an ordering and stayed visible into following years, so no single year is fixed. (C) supposes a later addition in a different hand, which the passage rules out: the mark shares the ink and hand of the surrounding stars.

Text
To map how much woody cover remained in a valley, an analyst used a satellite measure tuned to register only tall, closed tree canopy, then reported the mapped area as the valley's wooded ground. The measure was consistent and covered the whole valley at once. But much of the valley's woody growth is low: young trees regrowing after past clearing, and dense shrubland, none of which rise high enough to register on a measure set for tall canopy, however much ground they cover. Because the map could record only vegetation tall enough to trip its tall-canopy setting, its estimate of the valley's woody cover ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves that the valley holds almost no young trees or low woody growth at all among its taller standing forest.
  • B) likely undercounts the valley's woody cover, since low regrowth and shrubland cover ground the tall-canopy measure could not register. ✓
  • C) is of no use at all, because a satellite measure can never be checked against a survey made on the ground.
  • D) probably runs too low mainly because a single satellite pass cannot cover so large a valley in enough detail.

Explanation: (B) The measure registers only tall, closed canopy, and much of the valley's woody cover is low regrowth and shrubland that never trips that setting, so a map built from it leaves out much low growth and understates the valley's woody cover; the choice names that coverage gap. (A) reads the unregistered low growth as its absence, but it was simply not detected. (C) calls the map useless and uncheckable, overstating a fixable limit. (D) blames coverage and detail, yet the flaw is the tall-canopy setting; the same setting misses low growth however finely it maps.

Text
Scholars once traced a folk melody's unusual scale entirely to one regional singing tradition, in which that pattern of intervals is common. Setting the tune beside music from nearby regions unsettled that story. The melody also turns on a distinctive cadence and a modal shading that belong not to the first tradition but to a neighboring one, and these features recur across its verses rather than appearing once by chance. The two traditions are woven together through the tune, and the sources cannot show whether one singer blended them or the melody passed between regions over time. Because features of two traditions run through the melody together, the tune ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) belongs mostly to the neighboring tradition, with the first tradition's features amounting to no more than a faint trace.
  • B) shows the first tradition to have contributed nothing, since a tune carrying a neighbor's cadence must come wholly from that neighbor.
  • C) is best understood as a blend of two regional traditions rather than as the work of the first tradition alone. ✓
  • D) most likely preserves a tuning system that fell out of use long before the melody was ever first sung.

Explanation: (C) The melody's scale comes from the first tradition, but its cadence and modal shading come from a neighboring one and recur across its verses, so the tune as a whole is a blend of both rather than the work of the first tradition alone. The choice revises the single-origin account without denying that the scale is the first tradition's. (A) makes the tune mostly the neighbor's, but the sources cannot rank the two woven layers. (B) denies the first tradition any part, contradicting its genuine scale. (D) invents an extinct tuning system the passage never raises.