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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 30)

Drill 30 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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Drill 30 — current you are here

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 30) 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
On one common account of fair procedure, a ruling against a person counts as fair only if that person had a real chance to answer the case before the decision was made; where someone is judged and penalized with no opportunity to respond beforehand, the account holds that the ruling fails to be fair, whatever its final merits. Consider a tenants' board that fines a particular resident for a disputed noise complaint, reaching and imposing its decision before the resident is ever told a complaint exists or invited to reply. If the account is right, someone applying it to this case should conclude that the board's ruling ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) is not fair on the account, since the resident was fined before ever being told of the complaint or given a chance to answer it. ✓
  • B) is fair on the account, provided the board turns out to have weighed the noise complaint correctly on the underlying facts.
  • C) cannot be judged by the account at all, since a dispute settled by a tenants' board falls outside what the account was meant to cover.
  • D) counts as fair on the account, since acting quickly on a complaint is exactly the kind of promptness the account most prizes.

Explanation: (A) The account makes a ruling fair only if the person could answer the case beforehand, and here the resident was fined before learning of the complaint or being invited to reply, so the required chance to respond never came and the ruling fails to be fair on the account. Applying the stated condition yields exactly this. (B) makes fairness turn on getting the merits right, but the account turns on a prior hearing, so it reverses the standard. (C) places the case outside the account, yet the account exists to judge such rulings. (D) praises promptness, ignoring that the speed is exactly what denied the resident a chance to answer.

Text
Fisheries scientists at first explained the exceptional size of a lake's trout entirely by its rich supply of prey, since well-fed fish grow large. A fuller study unsettled that account. This lake also holds very few of the predators that elsewhere cut down young trout before they can grow, and where such predators are scarce, more trout survive to old age and reach great size simply by living longer. Abundant food and scarce predators occur together in this lake, and the survey cannot tell how much each contributes to the size of any individual fish. Given that two conditions coincide in the lake, the trout's great size ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) owes almost entirely to the plentiful prey, with the shortage of predators adding only a small and secondary amount.
  • B) shows that prey abundance plays no real part, since it is the scarcity of predators alone that lets these trout reach old age.
  • C) cannot be assigned to the rich food alone, since scarce predators also let trout live longer, and here the two causes stay tangled. ✓
  • D) most likely follows from an unusual mineral content in the lake's water that favors rapid bone and muscle growth in fish.

Explanation: (C) Scarce predators let more trout survive to old age and reach great size, a condition that overlaps with the rich food supply, and the survey cannot separate their shares, so the fish's size cannot be pinned on food by itself; the choice revises the food-only account without denying food a role. (A) makes prey the near-whole driver, but the survey cannot rank the two. (B) denies food any part, contradicting the stated point that well-fed fish grow large. (D) invents an unusual mineral content the passage never raises.

Text
A printing historian examines an undated political broadside. Its text is set throughout in a distinctive typeface whose design is well documented: it was first cut and cast by a particular foundry in a known year, and no printing shop could have obtained the type before the foundry produced it. The broadside's type shows the fresh, unworn edges of a recent casting rather than the battered look of long use. Since a printer cannot set a page in a type that has not yet been made, the broadside ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) must have been printed some years before the foundry first cut that typeface, since fresh, sharp type points to an older and finer press.
  • B) cannot have been printed before the foundry first cut that typeface, since the type did not exist for any shop to use earlier. ✓
  • C) can be dated to the very year the foundry first cast the typeface, since possessing the fresh type fixes the printing to that year.
  • D) was most likely produced in a city far from the foundry, since distinctive type of this kind traveled widely among distant shops.

Explanation: (B) A printer cannot set a page in type that has not yet been made, so a broadside set in a typeface first cut in a known year cannot predate that year. That first-casting year is the earliest the broadside can be. (A) puts the broadside years before the type existed, reversing the direction the casting date sets. (C) claims the exact year, but fresh type still gives only an earliest date, since the type stayed in use afterward. (D) guesses at the printing city, which the passage never raises.

Text
A firm at first credited a jump in one plant's output entirely to a new piecework bonus that rewarded faster work. A review of the plant's records complicated that story. In the same quarter the bonus began, the plant had also replaced several aging machines with faster models, and quicker equipment lifts output on its own, apart from any change in how hard the workers push. The bonus and the new machines arrived together in that single quarter, and the records cannot show how much of the added output each produced. Given that two changes landed at once, the rise in output ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) flows mostly from the new bonus, with the faster machines adding only a slight and secondary lift to the plant's total.
  • B) shows that the new machines did nothing, since it is plainly the bonus that drove the workers to their faster pace.
  • C) was probably caused instead by a fall in the price of the raw materials the plant drew on during that same quarter.
  • D) is better read as the result of two overlapping changes, since the faster machines could raise output on their own, apart from the bonus. ✓

Explanation: (D) The faster machines lift output on their own and arrived in the same quarter as the bonus, and the records cannot separate their shares, so the rise cannot be laid to the bonus by itself; the choice revises the bonus-only account without denying the bonus a role. (A) makes the bonus the main driver, but the records cannot rank the two changes. (B) denies the machines any effect, contradicting the stated point that faster equipment lifts output. (C) blames a raw-material price change the passage never raises.

Text
A soil scientist noticed that seedlings came up far more thickly in one field plot over a single season. That season the plot had been treated with a microbial soil inoculant meant to aid young roots, and she wondered whether the inoculant boosted germination or whether it had simply been a favorable spring across the whole farm. She followed a second plot in the same field, matched in soil type, drainage, and sowing rate and planted with the same seed lot, that received no inoculant over the same weeks. There, germination held at its usual modest level, showing none of the surge seen in the treated plot. Because the surge appeared in the treated plot alone, the inoculant ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) does more to explain the thicker germination than a farm-wide mild spring, given the untreated plot's flat result. ✓
  • B) evidently made no difference, since seedlings had in fact been coming up equally thickly in both plots throughout the season.
  • C) probably mattered far less than the extra sunlight the treated plot received from a wide new gap recently opened in the bordering hedgerow.
  • D) worked chiefly because the untreated comparison plot lay on distinctly heavier clay that drains slowly and chills young seed.

Explanation: (A) Germination surged only in the plot given the inoculant, while a matched plot alike in soil, drainage, and sowing rate held at its usual level over the same weeks, so a farm-wide favorable spring cannot explain a surge confined to one plot, and the inoculant best fits the pattern. The choice ties the surge to the inoculant without calling it the sole cause. (B) claims both plots sprouted equally thickly, contradicting the steady level in the untreated plot. (C) credits a hedgerow gap and extra sunlight the passage never mentions. (D) blames a clay-and-drainage gap, but the plots were matched on exactly those, holding them constant.