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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 28)

Drill 28 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 28) 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 navy raising crews one summer offered a cash enlistment bounty that varied from port to port, set higher in some towns than others for reasons unrelated to the towns themselves. A historian later lined up each town's bounty against its rate of sign-ups. Towns offering the largest bounty drew proportionally the most recruits; towns with a middling bounty drew a middling share; towns offering little or none drew about their usual trickle. All the ports lay under the same wartime mood and the same recruiting drive, which fell on every town alike. Because enlistment rose step by step with the size of the bounty each town offered, the sign-up rate ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must reflect the swell of wartime patriotism, since only a surge of shared feeling could move so many men to enlist at once.
  • B) is plausibly tied to each town's bounty rather than to a general patriotic mood, since it climbed in step with the bounty. ✓
  • C) shows that the bounty scarcely mattered, given that recruiting officers visited every one of the ports during the very same summer.
  • D) was likely set instead by how close each port stood to the shipyards where the newly raised crews would first report for service.

Explanation: (B) Sign-ups scaled step by step with each town's bounty while the same wartime mood and recruiting drive fell on all the ports alike, and a factor shared equally cannot produce a gradient keyed to bounty size, so enlistment tracks the bounty. The choice ties it to the bounty without calling it the only spur. (A) credits shared patriotism, but that fell on every town equally and cannot create the gradient. (C) says the bounty scarcely mattered, contradicting the step-by-step climb. (D) blames distance to the shipyards, a factor the passage never introduces.

Text
A bibliographer compares several printed editions of the same old text. One edition carries a peculiar misprint, a garbled line found nowhere in the original but first introduced by a particular earlier edition when its compositor misread the copy. That earlier edition is dated; the garbled line appears in it and in nothing before it. Since a compositor sets from a copy in front of him and can only pass on an error already present in what he sets from, an edition carrying that exact misprint must have been set from the edition that first made it, or from a copy descended from that one. Given that the edition under study reproduces the misprint, it ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must be older than the edition that first introduced the misprint, since a garbled line takes many printings to spread through a text.
  • B) can be dated to the precise year of the edition that first made the error, since sharing the misprint fixes them to one moment.
  • C) was most likely printed in a different language from the edition that first carried the garbled and misread line.
  • D) cannot be earlier than the edition that first made the misprint, since the error had to exist in its copy first. ✓

Explanation: (D) A compositor can pass on only an error already in his copy, so an edition carrying the misprint must descend from the edition that first made it and cannot predate that source. The choice states exactly that ordering bound. (A) makes the later edition older than the error's source, reversing the descent. (B) claims a precise shared year, but a shared error fixes order, not a date. (C) guesses at a language difference the passage never raises.

Text
On one account of wordplay, a pun works only when both of a word's meanings stay live for the reader at the same moment, so that the two senses press against each other; where one sense has faded from ordinary use and the reader no longer feels it, the play collapses and only a single flat meaning remains. Consider a line built on a pun whose second meaning rests on a sense of the word that has since dropped entirely out of the language, so that a present-day reader knows only the surviving sense. If the account is right, a critic applying it to this line should conclude that, for that reader, the line ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) delivers its wordplay with special force, because a reader who feels only one meaning meets that surviving sense free of distraction.
  • B) falls outside anything the account can weigh, since a pun that leans on an outdated meaning is not the sort of case the account covers.
  • C) no longer lands as the pun the account describes, since only one of its two meanings still stays live for that reader. ✓
  • D) keeps working as a pun on the account, given that a line holding any word with more than one recorded meaning satisfies it.

Explanation: (C) The account makes a pun depend on both senses staying live for the reader at once, and here one sense has dropped from the language so the reader feels only the survivor, so the required clash never occurs and the play collapses into a single meaning. That collapse is just what the account predicts. (A) says one meaning heightens the effect, but the account requires two, so it reverses the standard. (B) places the line outside the account, yet the account exists to judge just such cases. (D) claims any multi-sense word suffices, ignoring the account's demand that both senses be live for the reader.

Text
Entomologists once tied the dark wings of a moth in certain uplands entirely to soot from nearby mills, reasoning that darker moths hid better against soot-stained bark. Wider collecting muddied that story. The same dark form was common on high, cool slopes far from any mill, where dark wings absorb more warmth from thin sunlight and let a moth fly earlier on cold mornings, a real advantage in the chill. Sooty air and cold uplands happen to overlap across this moth's range, and the collections cannot say how much each pressure shapes any one population's coloring. Because two advantages coincide across the moth's range, the dark wings ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) arise mostly from the soot, with the warmth that dark wings gather in the cold adding only a minor secondary edge.
  • B) prove that mill soot had nothing to do with the coloring, since the dark form thrives on cold slopes far from any mill.
  • C) likely come down to a scarcity of the pale lichens on which the moths of this region are known to feed and rest.
  • D) cannot be laid to mill soot alone, since dark wings also warm a moth in the chilly uplands and cannot be separated from soot here. ✓

Explanation: (D) Dark wings also warm the moth in the cool uplands, a real advantage where the dark form thrives far from any mill, and the collections cannot separate that thermal pressure from the soot camouflage, so the coloring cannot be pinned on soot by itself; the choice revises the soot-only account without denying soot a role. (A) makes soot the main driver, but the data cannot rank the two. (B) denies soot any part, contradicting the stated camouflage advantage against sooty bark. (C) invents a lichen shortage the passage never raises.

Text
A district administrator noticed that unexcused tardies dropped sharply at one high school over a single term. That term the school had pushed its first bell nearly an hour later, and she wondered whether the later start was getting students in on time or whether some district-wide change, a calendar tweak or a mild winter, had lifted punctuality everywhere. She tracked a second high school across town, matched in size, commute patterns, and student mix, that kept its old early bell over the same weeks. There, tardies held near their usual level, showing none of the drop seen at the later-starting school. With the drop confined to the later-starting school, the schedule change ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is a better explanation for the drop in tardies than a district-wide shift would be, since only the school that moved its bell improved. ✓
  • B) plainly did nothing at all, since tardies had in truth been running equally low at both of the high schools throughout the whole term.
  • C) probably mattered far less than the new crossing guard the district had recently posted at the busy intersection outside that school.
  • D) worked mainly because the early-bell comparison school happened to sit along a much more congested commuter route than the other.

Explanation: (A) Tardies fell only at the school that moved to a later bell, while a matched school alike in size, commute patterns, and student mix kept its early bell and held near its usual level over the same weeks, so a district-wide change cannot explain a drop confined to one school, and the schedule change best fits the pattern. The wording ranks it above the rival cause without naming it the sole one. (B) says both schools had long run equally low, contradicting the unchanged count at the early-bell school. (C) credits a crossing guard the passage never mentions. (D) blames a busier commute, but the schools were matched on commute patterns, holding that constant.