Test: Craft and Structure - SAT MCQ

The text is from Anatole France's 1912 novel The Gods Will Have Blood.

Those who make a trade out of foretelling the future rarely grow rich. Their attempts to deceive are too easily found out and arouse detestation. And yet it would be necessary to detest them much, much more if they foretold the future correctly. For a man's life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it must be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves, absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss, in illusions, our happiness.

The main idea conveyed in the above monologue can best be summarized as

In 2014, Amelia Quon and her team at NASA set out to build a helicopter capable of flying on Mars. Because Mars's atmosphere is only one percent as dense as Earth's, the air of Mars would not provide enough resistance to the rotating blades of a standard helicopter for the aircraft to stay aloft. For five years, Quon's team tested designs in a lab that mimicked Mars's atmospheric conditions. The craft the team ultimately designed can fly on Mars because its blades are longer and rotate faster than those of a helicopter of the same size built for Earth.

According to the text, why would a helicopter built for Earth be unable to fly on Mars?

The first passage is excerpted from Out or Doors—California and Oregon. by J. A. Graves; the second At the Earth's Core, a work of fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Passage 1

In the pasture were swales of damp land. literally overgrown with wild blackberry bushes. They bore prolific crops of long, black, juicy berries, far superior to the tame berries, and they were almost entirely free from seeds. Many a time have I temporarily bankrupted my stomach on hot blackberry roll, with good, rich sauce. The country fairly teemed with game. Quail and rabbit were with us all the time. Doves came by the thousands in the early summer and departed in the fall. In winter the wild ducks and geese were more than abundant. In the spring wild pigeons visited us in great numbers. There was one old oak tree which was a favourite resting-place with them. Sheltered by some live oak bushes. I was always enabled to sneak up and kill many of them out of this tree.

Passage 2

We must have travelled several miles through the dark and dismal wood when we came suddenly upon a dense village built high among the branches of the trees. As we approached it my escort broke into wild shouting which was immediately answered from within, and a moment later a swarm of creatures of the same strange race as those who had captured me poured out to meet us. Again I was the centre of a wildly chattering horde. I was pulled this way and that. Pinched, pounded, and thumped until I was black and blue. yet I do not think that their treatment was dictated by either cruelty or malice—I was a curiosity. a freak. a new plaything. and their childish minds required the added evidence of all their senses to back up the testimony of their eyes.

Which most accurately describes the sentiments that the Passage 1 author has toward the words "old oak tree" and "oak bushes" with respect to the sentiments that the Passage 2 author has toward the word "wood"?

This paragraph, taken from a letter the author writes to her sister, is from Mary Shelley's science fiction novel, Frankenstein.

Will you smile at the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer? You would not if you saw him. You have been tutored and refined by books and retirement from the world, and you are therefore somewhat fastidious, but this only renders you the more fit to appreciate the extraordinary merits of this wonderful man. Sometimes I have endeavoured to discover what quality it is which he possesses that elevates him so immeasurably above any other person I ever knew. I believe it to be an intuitive discernment, a quick but never-failing power of judgment, a penetration into the causes of things, unequalled for clearness and precision; add to this a facility of expression and a voice whose varied intonations are soul-subduing music.

The sentences underlined suggest that which of the following pairs of qualities are most admired about the word "divine wanderer" first mentioned?

Astronomers are confident that the star Betelgeuse will eventually consume all the helium in its core and explode in a supernova. They are much less confident, however, about when this will happen, since that depends on internal characteristics of Betelgeuse that are largely unknown. Astrophysicist Sarafina El- Badry Nance and colleagues recently investigated whether acoustic waves in the star could be used to determine internal stellar states but concluded that this method could not sufficiently reveal Betelgeuse's internal characteristics to allow its evolutionary state to be firmly fixed.

Which choice best describes the function of the second sentence in the overall structure of the text?

Text 1

Conventional wisdom long held that human social systems evolved in stages, beginning with hunter-gatherers forming small bands of members with roughly equal status. The shift to agriculture about 12,000 years ago sparked population growth that led to the emergence of groups with hierarchical structures: associations of clans first, then chiefdoms, and finally, bureaucratic states.

Text 2

In a 2021 book, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow maintain that humans have always been socially flexible, alternately forming systems based on hierarchy and collective ones with decentralized leadership. The authors point to evidence that as far back as 50,000 years ago some hunter- gatherers adjusted their social structures seasonally, at times dispersing in small groups but also assembling into communities that included esteemed individuals.

Based on the texts, how would Graeber and Wengrow (Text 2) most likely respond to the "conventional wisdom" presented in Text 1?

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

· In the late 1890s, over 14,000 unique varieties of apples were grown in the US.
· The rise of industrial agriculture in the mid-1900s narrowed the range of commercially grown crops.
· Thousands of apple varieties considered less suitable for commercial growth were lost.
· Today, only 15 apple varieties dominate the market, making up 90% of apples purchased in the US.
· The Lost Apple Project, based in Washington State, attempts to find and grow lost apple varieties

The student wants to emphasize the decline in uniq ue apple varieties in the US and specify why this decline occurred. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish these goals?