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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Rhetorical Synthesis (Drill 30)

Drill 30 · Reading & Writing · Hard Rhetorical Synthesis

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Drill 30 — current you are here

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Rhetorical Synthesis (Drill 30) is a Reading & Writing practice drill covering Hard Rhetorical Synthesis. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

Hard Rhetorical Synthesis questions present a set of research notes and a specific writing goal, then ask you to choose the sentence that best accomplishes that goal using only the notes. The wrong answers are usually accurate statements that serve a different purpose than the one asked for, or that subtly misstate the notes. Match the rhetorical task exactly.

Questions & Explanations

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • A longbow holds its drawn energy only through the archer's own muscle, gripping the pulled string by hand. • Because the arm soon tires, an archer cannot hold a longbow at full draw for more than a few moments before loosing. • A crossbow holds its drawn string on a catch, locked in place by the mechanism rather than by the user. • Once spanned and latched, a crossbow can be held ready and aimed for as long as the user likes without strain. • This is why a crossbow can be carried cocked and fired the instant a target appears, while a longbow must be drawn and loosed in one motion.

Question 1. The student wants to convey the difference in how each weapon holds its drawn energy and what that means for holding aim. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) The longbow holds its draw only by the archer's tiring muscle, so it cannot be held long, while the crossbow locks its string on a catch and can be held aimed at ease. ✓
  • B) A longbow holds its drawn energy only through the archer's own muscle, gripping the pulled bowstring directly by hand the entire time it is kept at the ready.
  • C) Once it has been spanned and latched firmly onto its catch, a crossbow can be held fully ready and carefully aimed for as long as the user likes without any strain at all.
  • D) Because a crossbow can be carried already cocked, it can be fired the very instant a target appears, while a longbow has to be drawn and loosed in a single motion.

Explanation: Choice A is the best answer. The sentence contrasts both weapons on the dimension the goal names, muscle-held and brief against catch-held and sustained, for holding aim. Choice B states only the longbow's muscle-held draw, one weapon rather than the paired difference. Choice C describes only the crossbow's holding, one weapon rather than the paired difference. Choice D dwells on when each can fire, the timing result rather than how each holds its draw.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Short-staple cotton has fuzzy green seeds that cling tightly to the fiber and must be pulled out before the cotton can be sold. • Removing those seeds by hand was so slow that one worker could clean only about a pound of fiber in a day. • Eli Whitney built his cotton gin in 1793 to do that seed-removal job by machine instead of by hand. • In the gin, a hand-cranked cylinder of wire teeth pulls the fiber through a grid whose slots are too narrow to let the seeds pass. • A single gin could clean many times more cotton in a day than a worker could by hand.

Question 2. The student wants to convey what Whitney designed the cotton gin to accomplish. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) In the gin, a hand-cranked cylinder of wire teeth pulls the cotton fiber through a grid whose narrow slots will not let the clinging seeds pass through with it.
  • B) Short-staple cotton carries fuzzy green seeds that cling tightly to the fiber, and each of those seeds has to be pulled out before the cotton can be sold.
  • C) A single cotton gin could clean many times more cotton fiber in a day than one worker laboring by hand ever could.
  • D) Whitney built the cotton gin in 1793 to pull the clinging seeds out of short-staple cotton by machine, a job too slow to do by hand. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is the best answer. The sentence states the purpose Whitney built the gin for, removing the clinging seeds by machine, which is the aim the goal asks for. Choice A explains the gin's mechanism, how it works rather than what it was meant to do. Choice B describes the seed problem, the difficulty without naming the gin's aim. Choice C reports how much it could clean, a result rather than the design aim.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • For centuries, musical strings were made of gut, twisted from dried animal intestine. • Nylon strings, a synthetic kind first sold in the late 1940s, gradually came to replace gut on many instruments. • A study measured how the two kinds of string respond to changes in the surrounding humidity. • It found that gut strings swelled and shifted with humidity far more than nylon strings did. • Players often add that gut has a warmer tone, though that judgment is a matter of taste rather than measurement.

Question 3. The student wants to present the study's finding about how the two strings respond to humidity. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) For many centuries before nylon arrived, musical strings were twisted from gut, which was made from dried animal intestine.
  • B) The study, which measured how the two kinds respond to humidity, found that gut strings swelled and shifted with the changing humidity far more than nylon strings did. ✓
  • C) Players themselves often say that gut strings give a warmer, rounder tone than nylon ones do, though that preference is really a matter of personal taste rather than measurement.
  • D) Nylon strings, which are a synthetic material rather than an animal product, were first put on sale to working musicians at some point in the late 1940s.

Explanation: Choice B is the best answer. The sentence reports the measured result, that gut reacts to humidity far more than nylon, which is the finding the goal asks for. Choice A recounts the history of gut strings, background rather than the finding. Choice C dwells on a subjective tone preference, an aside rather than the measured result. Choice D gives only the date nylon appeared, a stray fact rather than the humidity finding.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Long before any potter's wheel, potters built vessels by coiling, stacking ropes of clay and smoothing them into walls by hand. • Coiling supplies all the forming energy through the potter's own hands and was the oldest way of making pots. • A slow wheel, or tournette, appeared in the Near East around 3500 BCE and was used mainly to turn a coiled pot while finishing it. • Only later, with the fast flywheel-driven wheel of the third millennium BCE, did true throwing arise, shaping a spinning lump into rounder, thinner, more uniform pots. • Even after the fast wheel arrived, coiling did not vanish; potters kept using it alongside throwing for many kinds of work.

Question 4. The student wants to set wheel-throwing in the context of the older coiling tradition it grew from. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) On the wheel, a potter shapes a spinning lump of clay with steady, guiding hand pressure, a technique that is called throwing.
  • B) Wheel-thrown pots tend to come out rounder, thinner, and more uniform than the pots built up by hand coiling.
  • C) Wheel-throwing grew out of the older coiling tradition, beginning with a slow tournette that turned coiled pots for finishing and only later a fast wheel quick enough to shape the clay itself. ✓
  • D) In the coiling method, the potter stacks long ropes of soft clay one on top of another and then smooths them together into the rising walls of the vessel, working it all entirely by hand.

Explanation: Choice C is the best answer. The sentence places throwing against the older coiling tradition it grew from, the slow tournette giving way to the fast wheel, which is the historical context the goal asks for. Choice A explains how throwing works, a mechanism rather than its context. Choice B compares the finished pots, a quality difference rather than the historical context. Choice D explains how coiling works, the older method without connecting it to throwing's arrival.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • The student is drafting a fictionalized scene, modeled on historical accounts, of a vatman making paper by hand. • The mould is a screen stretched on a frame; the deckle is an open rim that sits on top to shape the sheet's edges. • The vatman dips the mould and deckle into a vat of watery pulp, then lifts it out level. • As water drains through the screen, he shakes the frame so the wet fibers settle and lock into a sheet. • The scene should open in the moment, with the vatman bent over the vat at the start of the day's work.

Question 5. The student wants to open the scene in the moment, with the vatman at work over the vat. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) Bent over the pulp-filled vat at first light, the vatman dipped his mould, drew it up streaming, and gave it the practiced shake that drew a sheet from the water. ✓
  • B) The deckle's open rim sits atop the mould to dam the wet pulp, and it is this raised rim that leaves a sheet of handmade paper its characteristic soft, feathered edge.
  • C) A mould is a screen stretched across a frame, and a deckle is the open rim that rests on top of it.
  • D) To form a single sheet of paper, the vatman dips the joined mould and deckle down into the vat of watery pulp and then lifts the whole frame back out, holding it level as it drains.

Explanation: Choice A is the best answer. The sentence opens in the moment with the vatman bent over the vat drawing a sheet, the narrative opening the goal asks for. Choice B explains how the deckle edge forms, an explanation rather than a scene. Choice C defines the tools, a definition rather than a narrative opening. Choice D lays out the procedure flatly, a set of steps rather than an in-the-moment scene.