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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Rhetorical Synthesis (Drill 6)

Drill 6 · Reading & Writing · Hard Rhetorical Synthesis

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Rhetorical Synthesis (Drill 6) 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: • The waggle dance is a movement that honeybee foragers perform inside the hive after returning from a food source. • A research team wanted to learn how the dance conveys where a food source is located. • During the dance, a forager walks a straight run while shaking its body, then circles back to repeat it. • The team found that the angle of the straight run signals the direction to the food and its duration signals the distance. • Beekeepers sometimes watch these dances through a glass-walled hive to estimate where bees are foraging.

Question 1. The student wants to emphasize the aim of the research team's study. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) A returning forager walks a straight run while shaking its body and then circles back to repeat the movement inside the hive.
  • B) Watched through a glass-walled hive, the waggle dance lets beekeepers estimate where a colony's foragers are gathering food.
  • C) The team wanted to find out how the waggle dance communicates the location of a food source to other bees. ✓
  • D) The team found that the straight run's angle signals direction while its duration signals distance to the food.

Explanation: Choice C is the best answer. The sentence states the team's aim, the question it set out to answer: how the dance communicates where food is. Choice A describes what the dance looks like, the steps a forager performs, rather than the question the team set out to answer. Choice B reports a use beekeepers make of the dance, not the goal of the team's study. Choice D gives the study's finding, what the dance signals, instead of the aim that motivated it.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Windmills have long been used to lift water out of low ground into drainage channels. • Two pumping designs were compared on a reclaimed lowland. • A scoop-wheel mill turns a large paddled wheel that pushes water up a short rise. • An Archimedean-screw mill turns an angled screw that carries water upward as it spins. • The scoop wheel moves more water at once, while the screw can raise water to a greater height.

Question 2. The student wants to compare the two pumping designs. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) Windmills have long been put to work lifting water out of low ground and into the channels that drain it.
  • B) The scoop-wheel mill moves more water at once, while the screw mill can lift water higher. ✓
  • C) A scoop-wheel mill drives a large paddled wheel that pushes water up a short rise.
  • D) The Archimedean screw moves more water at once, while the scoop wheel can raise water to a greater height.

Explanation: Choice B is the best answer. The sentence compares the two designs directly on the points the notes contrast: volume moved versus height reached. Choice A gives general background on what drainage windmills do and names neither design, so it compares nothing. Choice C describes only the scoop-wheel mill, leaving the screw mill out, so no comparison is made. Choice D compares the two designs, the right task, but swaps their strengths: the notes say the scoop wheel moves more water at once and the screw raises water higher.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • In dry regions, people have long faced the problem of moving groundwater to fields without losing it to evaporation. • A qanat is a gently sloping tunnel that carries water underground from a source in the hills to a settlement below. • A line of vertical shafts is dug down to the tunnel at intervals to remove soil and allow access for repairs. • Because the water travels underground, far less of it evaporates than in an open ditch crossing the same distance. • Some qanats built centuries ago still carry water to towns today.

Question 3. The student wants to introduce the qanat to an audience unfamiliar with it and convey what kind of structure it is. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) A qanat is a gently sloping underground tunnel that moves water from a source in the hills to a settlement below. ✓
  • B) Workers dig a line of vertical shafts down to the tunnel at intervals so that soil can be removed and repairs can be made.
  • C) Far less water is lost to evaporation in a qanat than in an open ditch running the same distance, because the flow stays underground.
  • D) Some qanats dug many centuries ago still deliver water to the towns they serve today.

Explanation: Choice A is the best answer. The sentence names the structure and tells an unfamiliar reader what it is: a sloping underground tunnel that carries water from the hills to a settlement. Choice B describes one construction detail, the access shafts, without introducing the structure as a whole. Choice C highlights one advantage of the design but never says what a qanat is, so a new reader would not know the thing being described. Choice D offers an impressive fact about their longevity but does not explain what a qanat is.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Cities are often warmer than the countryside around them, an effect known as the urban heat island. • This warmth is usually credited to pavement and buildings absorbing heat during the day. • A study measured nighttime temperatures across one city and its outskirts over a summer. • The author of a report on the study noted that the warmest areas were not always the most paved. • The report's author wrote, "The pattern suggests that how heat escapes at night matters as much as how much is absorbed by day."

Question 4. The student wants to include a quotation that questions the usual explanation for the urban heat island. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) Cities tend to run a good deal warmer than the open countryside that surrounds them, a pattern researchers have come to call the urban heat island effect.
  • B) As the report's author put it, "The pattern suggests that how heat escapes at night matters as much as how much is absorbed by day." ✓
  • C) The study tracked nighttime temperatures at many points across a single city and its outskirts over the course of one warm summer.
  • D) One account states the usual view plainly, that a city's warmth is "credited to pavement and buildings absorbing heat during the day."

Explanation: Choice B is the best answer. The sentence quotes the report's author raising a doubt about the standard account, pointing to nighttime heat loss rather than daytime absorption alone. Choice A defines the urban heat island in neutral terms and includes no quotation. Choice C describes the study's method but quotes no one. Choice D quotes the usual explanation rather than questioning it, which is what the goal asks the quotation to do.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Seeds buried in soil send their roots downward and their shoots upward, no matter which way the seed happens to lie. • A study set out to learn how a seed senses which direction is up. • Inside certain plant cells are heavy starch grains that settle to the lowest point of the cell under gravity. • The study found that the settled position of these grains lines up with the direction the root then grows. • Seeds of many unrelated plants contain cells with grains of this kind.

Question 5. The student wants to summarize the study's main finding. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) The study found that where these starch grains settle in the cell matches the direction the root grows. ✓
  • B) Within certain plant cells sit heavy starch grains that settle to the lowest point of the cell under the pull of gravity.
  • C) A seed will send its root downward and its shoot upward regardless of the position in which it comes to rest in the soil.
  • D) Cells holding starch grains of this kind are found in the seeds of many plants that are not closely related.

Explanation: Choice A is the best answer. The sentence captures the study's central finding: the settled position of the grains corresponds to the direction the root grows. Choice B describes the starch grains but stops short of the result that links them to root direction. Choice C restates background about how seeds orient and reports no finding from the study. Choice D notes how widespread these cells are, a side fact rather than the study's main finding.