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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 27)

Drill 27 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 27) 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
A historian studying a town council found that written petitions to it climbed sharply in one decade. Reviewing the council's own registers, she saw that for the two decades before that climb the yearly number of petitions had held roughly steady, with no gradual drift upward. The rise set in only after the council started posting its decisions publicly, a change that let residents see how earlier petitions had fared. She weighed whether the surge showed a fresh appetite for petitioning that had been building on its own or whether the new openness had drawn residents in. Because the counts stayed flat until the decisions were made public, the new practice of publishing decisions ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) cannot have mattered at all to the petitioners, since the number of petitions had already been climbing year by year long before it began.
  • B) likely reflects a sharp jump in the town's total population over the very same decade that the publishing began.
  • C) better accounts for the surge in petitions than an appetite already building, since the yearly counts held flat until the decisions were posted. ✓
  • D) must have been ordered by a higher authority determined to expose the council's earlier handling of local disputes to public view.

Explanation: (C) Petitions held flat for two decades with no upward drift and rose only once decisions were posted, so a pre-existing appetite that was building on its own is ruled out by the flat baseline, and the new openness best accounts for the timing. The choice matches its foil to what the flat record actually excludes. (A) says petitions had long been climbing, contradicting the flat pre-period. (B) credits a population jump the passage records nowhere. (D) invents an order from a higher authority, a motive the passage never raises.

Text
To describe the animals living on a patch of seafloor, a survey ship dragged a sediment dredge across it and reported the creatures it brought up as the patch's bottom-dwelling community. The dredge scooped a rich load of worms and clams from the muddy floor. But the dredge can only bite into soft sediment; where the bottom turns to bare rock or hard reef, its jaws skim across without gathering anything, and the animals that cling to those hard surfaces, such as anemones and encrusting sponges, go entirely ungathered. Because the dredge could sample only the soft-sediment floor, its account of the patch's bottom life ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves that anemones and encrusting sponges of every kind must be wholly absent from this particular patch of open seafloor.
  • B) likely leaves out the animals bound to hard surfaces, since the dredge skims across rock without gathering what clings there. ✓
  • C) is too incomplete for any use, because a single dredge haul can never be set beside a haul taken by another instrument.
  • D) probably overstates the community, since one pass of a dredge is far too brief to sample a broad seafloor patch fairly.

Explanation: (B) The dredge bites only soft sediment and skims across rock, so animals clinging to hard surfaces go ungathered no matter how rich the mud haul, and a tally from the dredge cannot stand for the whole patch; the choice names that substrate gap. (A) treats the ungathered animals as absent, but they were merely unsampled. (C) calls the haul useless and incomparable, overstating a fixable limit. (D) blames a single brief pass, yet more passes with the same dredge would still miss the hard-bottom animals.

Text
An analyst dates a timber roof by matching the growth rings in its beams against a regional master chronology, a dated sequence of ring widths built from many overlapping samples. The rings in one beam match that master sequence cleanly, and the beam's outermost surviving ring corresponds to a specific year in it. Because a tree cannot lay down a ring before it grows, and rings are added only while the tree lives, the tree's felling cannot predate the beam's outermost preserved ring; some outer wood may also have been trimmed away, which could only push the true felling later. Given that the last surviving ring marks the earliest the tree could have been cut, the roof ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must have been built well before the year of that outermost ring, since seasoned timber is normally left to age for decades before use.
  • B) can be pinned to the exact year of the outermost ring, since that final ring fixes the precise moment the roof was raised.
  • C) can be no earlier than the year of the beam's outermost surviving ring, since the tree could not have been felled before that ring formed. ✓
  • D) most likely came from a forest lying far to the south of the wider region where the master chronology's overlapping samples had originally been gathered.

Explanation: (C) The outermost surviving ring cannot form before the tree grew it, and trimmed outer wood could only move the felling later, so the tree was cut no earlier than that ring's year and the roof cannot predate that year. The choice states exactly that earliest-possible bound. (A) puts the roof well before the ring's year, reversing the direction the felling bound sets. (B) claims a precise year, but lost outer wood means the ring gives only an earliest date. (D) guesses at the forest's location, which the passage never raises.

Text
A town's yearly tax revenue rose sharply in the year a new tax collector took office. The obvious reading was that the townspeople had simply grown wealthier, giving more to tax. To test that, the historian examined the town's property rolls and compared them, item by item, against the rolls from just before the change. The number of taxable properties and their assessed values had not risen or meaningfully shifted, and the tax rate was the same in both years; the same holdings, at the same worth, appeared on both. Because the taxable base and the rate alike stood unchanged while the revenue climbed, the higher revenue ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) more likely reflects fuller collection under the new collector than a rise in the town's taxable wealth, which the rolls show unchanged. ✓
  • B) shows plainly that the town's taxable wealth had swelled, since only greater underlying wealth can lift the yearly revenue at all.
  • C) was probably driven by a steep rise in the tax rate imposed in the very year the new collector took office.
  • D) cannot be interpreted in any way at all, since a single year's revenue figure carries no meaning without figures from many later years.

Explanation: (A) The property rolls show the number and assessed value of taxable holdings unchanged, and the tax rate held the same across the two years, so both a rise in wealth and a rate hike are excluded, and fuller collection under the new collector better fits a revenue climb over a flat base. The choice draws only that bounded conclusion. (B) says wealth had swelled, contradicting the unchanged rolls. (C) blames a rate rise, but the passage states the rate was the same in both years. (D) calls the figure meaningless, ignoring the matched-roll comparison that makes a reading possible.

Text
Biologists first tied the unusually fast metamorphosis of tadpoles in certain ponds entirely to warm water, which is known to speed a tadpole's development. A closer look complicated that account. In these ponds the tadpoles were also densely crowded, and crowding on its own hurries metamorphosis, since tadpoles racing scarce food and space tend to leave the water sooner. Warm water and heavy crowding overlap in the same shrinking summer pools, and the field data cannot tell how much each contributes to any one pond's speed. Given that two influences are tangled together in these ponds, the rapid metamorphosis ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) stems almost wholly from the warm water, with crowding adding only a slight and secondary push toward leaving the pool a little sooner.
  • B) reflects the crowding in these pools alongside the warm water, two overlapping pressures the field data cannot tease apart. ✓
  • C) reveals that warm water plays no real part, since it is crowding, not temperature, that pushes tadpoles from the pond.
  • D) probably owes most of its speed to an unusual mix of dissolved minerals peculiar to these particular summer pools.

Explanation: (B) Crowding hurries metamorphosis on its own and overlaps with warm water in the same pools, and the data cannot separate their shares, so the fast development cannot be laid on warmth by itself; the choice revises the warmth-only account without denying warmth a role. (A) makes warm water the main driver, but the data cannot rank the two, so that overreaches. (C) denies warm water any part, contradicting the stated fact that it speeds development. (D) invents a dissolved-mineral difference found nowhere in the text.