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SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Rhetorical Synthesis (Drill 7)

Drill 7 · Reading & Writing · Hard Rhetorical Synthesis

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About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Rhetorical Synthesis (Drill 7) 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: • Some frogs survive winters in which their bodies freeze nearly solid. • A study examined how one such frog endures freezing without its cells being destroyed. • When ice begins forming on the frog's skin, its liver floods the blood with large amounts of glucose, a sugar. • The study found that this glucose spreads into the cells and limits the damage that ice would otherwise cause. • Frogs of this kind may stay frozen for weeks before thawing in spring.

Question 1. The student wants to present the study's findings. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) The study found that glucose released by the liver spreads into the frog's cells and limits the damage freezing would otherwise cause. ✓
  • B) Certain frogs are able to live through winters during which their bodies freeze almost completely solid.
  • C) The study looked at how one freeze-tolerant frog survives being frozen each winter without having the cells throughout its body destroyed by the ice.
  • D) A frog of this kind can remain frozen for several weeks before it thaws out in the spring.

Explanation: Choice A is the best answer. The sentence reports what the study found: liver glucose enters the cells and reduces freezing damage. Choice B gives background on which frogs can survive freezing and states no finding. Choice C describes the study's aim, what it set out to examine, rather than what it found. Choice D adds a fact about how long the frogs stay frozen, not a result of the study.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Bookbinders sew the folded sheets of a book together along its spine. • Two stitching methods were set side by side. • In Coptic stitching, the thread loops between the sections and links them so the book can open flat. • In a stab stitch, the thread passes straight through the whole stack near the spine edge, holding the pages firmly but keeping the book from opening flat. • Both methods can use the same kind of linen thread.

Question 2. The student wants to explain the difference between the two stitching methods. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) Bookbinders join the folded sheets of a book by sewing them together along the spine.
  • B) In Coptic stitching, the thread loops between the sections of the book and links them together, allowing the finished volume to open out and lie flat.
  • C) Coptic stitching loops between sections so the book opens flat, while a stab stitch passes through the stack and holds the pages firmly but less flexibly. ✓
  • D) Both stitching methods can be worked with the same kind of linen thread.

Explanation: Choice C is the best answer. The sentence sets the two methods against each other on the trait that distinguishes them: whether the book opens flat. Choice A gives general background on what binders do and names neither method, so it draws no distinction. Choice B describes only Coptic stitching, with nothing about the stab stitch to differ from. Choice D points to something the methods share rather than how they differ.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • For centuries, sailors found their way using charts drawn from coastlines and known landmarks. • Such charts grew more accurate as instruments for measuring position improved. • In the twentieth century, radio signals from fixed stations let ships fix their position without sighting land. • Today, satellite signals let a ship determine its location almost anywhere on the open ocean. • The earliest of these sea charts were copied by hand before printing made them widely available.

Question 3. The student wants to give an audience already familiar with satellite navigation a sense of the historical shift that preceded it. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) Today a ship can fix its position almost anywhere at sea using signals broadcast by satellites overhead.
  • B) Before satellites, sailors relied first on coastal charts and later on radio fixes, a shift toward finding position without sighting land. ✓
  • C) The first sea charts of this kind were reproduced by hand until printing allowed them to circulate widely.
  • D) Charts of the sea became steadily more accurate as the instruments sailors used to measure their position improved.

Explanation: Choice B is the best answer. The sentence traces the progression toward the satellite era the audience already knows, from coastal charts to radio fixes, framing the shift that led up to it. Choice A describes the present method the audience is assumed to know, not the history leading to it. Choice C offers one detail about how early charts were copied, not the broader arc of the shift. Choice D notes that charts improved but gives no sense of the stages leading toward satellite navigation.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Some tile floors are covered by shapes that fit together with no gaps and no overlaps. • This kind of complete, gap-free covering is called a tessellation. • A square grid is the simplest example, but many other shapes can tessellate as well. • Certain tilework repeats a small cluster of shapes across an entire surface. • The colors of the tiles are often chosen to make the repeating pattern easier to see.

Question 4. The student wants to define what "tessellation" means. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) Some kinds of tilework repeat a single small cluster of shapes over and over again across an entire surface.
  • B) A plain square grid is the simplest tessellation there is, though a great many other shapes can be made to tile a surface as well.
  • C) A tessellation is a covering of a surface by shapes that fit together with no gaps and no overlaps. ✓
  • D) Tile colors are frequently chosen so that the repeating pattern stands out more clearly to the eye of someone viewing the finished floor.

Explanation: Choice C is the best answer. The sentence gives the definition the goal asks for: a gap-free, overlap-free covering of a surface by shapes. Choice A describes repeating tilework but never defines the term. Choice B offers an example of a tessellation rather than saying what the term means. Choice D comments on tile color, which has nothing to do with defining the word.

Notes
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: • Before regular forecasts existed, people learned of coming storms only as the weather arrived. • In the nineteenth century, a national office began collecting weather reports by telegraph from distant stations. • Using those reports, the office issued an early weather forecast that appeared in a printed newspaper. • Readers could now read in the morning what conditions were expected later that day. • The office's reports were gathered from stations spread across the country.

Question 5. The student wants to convey the significance of an early printed weather forecast. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

  • A) Before forecasts existed, people typically found out about an approaching storm only once the weather had reached them.
  • B) During the nineteenth century, a national office started gathering weather reports sent by telegraph from far-off stations.
  • C) The weather reports that the office relied on were collected from a network of observing stations spread across the whole of the country.
  • D) With such a forecast, readers could learn in the morning paper what the weather was expected to do later that same day. ✓

Explanation: Choice D is the best answer. The sentence conveys why this early printed forecast mattered: ordinary readers could now know the day's expected weather in advance. Choice A describes the situation before forecasts existed rather than what the forecast changed. Choice B reports how the office gathered its data, a step toward the forecast rather than its significance. Choice C adds a detail about where the reports came from, not why the forecast was important.