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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 6)

Drill 6 · Reading & Writing · Hard Inferences

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Inferences (Drill 6) 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 reconstruct a valley's drought history, a team sampled tree rings only from conifers growing on the valley's dry, south-facing slope, where thin soils hold little water. Their chronology showed frequent, severe growth suppressions, which they read as valley-wide droughts. A later team pointed out that trees on the moist, north-facing slope, fed by deeper soils and runoff, often kept growing in the very years the south-slope trees faltered. Because the first chronology drew entirely from the slope most sensitive to any dry spell, the later team concluded that its record ______

Question 1. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) proves the valley endured more droughts than any neighboring valley did over the same centuries.
  • B) is unusable for dating purposes because trees on differing slopes cannot be compared at all.
  • C) likely overstates how often true valley-wide drought struck, since its trees registered even modest dry spells strongly. ✓
  • D) probably reflects the dry slope's naturally slower growth more than any true valley-wide drought pattern.

Explanation: (C) The chronology came only from the driest, most drought-sensitive slope, and trees on the wetter slope often grew through the same years, so a record built from the touchiest trees will register dry spells that were not truly valley-wide, overstating drought frequency. That is the bounded conclusion the choice draws. (A) claims a comparison with other valleys, which were never sampled. (B) says the record is unusable and the slopes incomparable, yet the passage compares them directly to make its point. (D) points to the dry slope's generally slower growth, but that is a constant background rate, not the source of the exaggerated drought signal; the issue is that the record was drawn only from the most drought-sensitive slope.

Text
On one common account of the elegy, the form does its work not by describing the dead in detail but by naming them and turning, near its close, to comfort the living who remain. A poem mourning a drowned shepherd spends its length cataloguing the landscape's grief, yet never names the dead youth and breaks off without any address to survivors. If the account is right, then a reader applying it to this poem should conclude that the poem ______

Question 2. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) falls short of what that account treats as the elegy's defining work, since it neither names the dead nor consoles the living. ✓
  • B) succeeds fully as an elegy on that account, because its lavish description of grieving nature is what the form chiefly requires.
  • C) cannot be judged by that account at all, given that the shepherd's death is only implied rather than stated outright in the text.
  • D) proves the account mistaken, since a work this moving must qualify as an elegy whatever conditions the account happens to list.

Explanation: (A) The account defines the elegy's work as naming the dead and turning to console the living, and this poem does neither, so by that standard it fails to do what the form is said to require. The choice applies the rule as given. (B) treats rich description of nature as the core requirement, but the account explicitly locates the work elsewhere, so it reverses the criterion. (C) claims the poem lies outside the account's reach because the death is only implied, yet the account is offered precisely to judge such cases. (D) says the poem's power refutes the account, but being moving is not among the conditions the account sets, so it cannot override them.

Text
In a limestone cave, a painted figure sits directly on a thin sheet of flowstone, the banded calcite that forms as mineral-rich water trickles down a wall. The pigment lies on top of the flowstone, filling its small surface pits, with no calcite over the paint. Uranium dating of the flowstone fixes a firm date for when that calcite sheet formed, and no younger calcite has grown across the pigment to cloud the sequence. Since the artist worked on a wall surface that had to be fully in place before any pigment could be laid over it, the painting ______

Question 3. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) was made at very nearly the same moment that the underlying flowstone sheet first began to form.
  • B) must be far older than the flowstone, which seeped down over the finished image long afterward.
  • C) can be dated exactly, since the flowstone's age fixes the precise year the figure was painted.
  • D) can be no older than the flowstone it rests upon, and so postdates that layer's formation. ✓

Explanation: (D) The paint sits on top of the flowstone and fills its pits, with no calcite over the paint, so the flowstone was already there when the figure was added; the dated layer therefore tells us the painting came after it. The choice states exactly that. (A) ties the painting to when the flowstone began forming, but the paint rests on the completed sheet, not its start. (B) makes the painting older than its own canvas, reversing the layering the passage describes. (C) claims an exact date, but the flowstone's age only shows the painting came later and cannot pin the precise year it was made.

Text
A public library extended its weekday closing time from six to nine and, over the next two months, logged a clear rise in total daily visits. Analysts asked whether the later hours drew the extra patrons or whether interest in the library was simply climbing anyway. They found that morning and afternoon visit counts, during the hours that had not changed, held essentially flat, while the entire increase fell within the newly added evening window. Given that the unchanged hours saw no growth, the added evening time ______

Question 4. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) probably had little real effect on total attendance, since library use across the day was most likely trending upward on its own anyway.
  • B) is more plausibly the source of the rise than a general climb in interest, since the gain fell entirely in the new hours. ✓
  • C) mattered less to the rise than a marketing campaign the library ran that season to publicize its longer schedule.
  • D) drew the extra visitors only because several nearby libraries had recently chosen to cut back their own evening availability.

Explanation: (B) The rise landed entirely in the newly opened evening hours while the unchanged daytime hours stayed flat, so a general climb in interest cannot account for it, and the added hours are the more plausible source. The choice predicates exactly that of the new hours. (A) asserts, however cautiously, an across-the-day upward trend, but the daytime counts were flat, which is the opposite. (C) credits a marketing campaign the passage never mentions. (D) invents a change at neighboring libraries that is nowhere in the text; the evidence given is the internal before-and-after contrast.

Text
Historians long described a frontier hilltop enclosure as a purely military garrison, reading its ditch and rampart as defenses and little else. Renewed excavation inside the walls turned up rows of loom weights, large grain-storage pits, and workshops for metal and leather, spread across areas once assumed to be barracks. The defenses are real, but the interior, densely packed with the tools and residue of daily craft and food processing, looks as much like a working settlement as a strongpoint. Taken together, the finds suggest that the enclosure's role ______

Question 5. Which choice most logically completes the text?

  • A) extended beyond defense to everyday production and storage, so a strictly military label understates what went on inside. ✓
  • B) was never military in any sense, the ditch and rampart serving only to mark off a purely civilian craft village.
  • C) can no longer be reconstructed, since the mix of military and domestic finds leaves the site's purpose wholly unknowable.
  • D) is best explained by trade with distant regions, given the range of goods the workshops must have imported and sold.

Explanation: (A) The defenses are real, but the interior also held looms, grain pits, and workshops, so the site combined defense with everyday production and storage, and a strictly military label leaves that out. The choice revises the old view without discarding the defensive evidence. (B) denies any military function, but the passage grants the ditch and rampart are genuine defenses. (C) says the purpose is now unknowable, yet the finds actually sharpen the picture. (D) leaps to long-distance trade, which the evidence of on-site manufacture does not support.