The Sat Practice Test 4
Reading Test
65 MINUTES, 52 QUESTIONS
Turn to Section 1 of your answer sheet to answer the questions in this section.
DIRECTIONS
Each passage or pair of passages below is followed by a number of questions. After reading
each passage or pair, choose the best answer to each question based on what is stated or
implied in the passage or passages and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or
graph).
Questions 1-10 are based on the following 25 fate into the servant of my will. All this I understand,
.......................................................................................................................................................................................................
passage. as I understand each detail of the technique by which
This passage is adapted from MacDonald Harris,
this is carried out. What I don’t understand is why I
The Balloonist. ©2011 by The Estate of Donald Heiney. am so intent on going to this particular place. Who
During the summer of 1897, the narrator of this story, a wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat
fictional Swedish scientist, has set out for the North Pole 30 it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg to Malmö like
in a hydrogen-powered balloon. a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from
their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is
My emotions are complicated and not beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read
readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to
simultaneously a pleasure and a pain. I am certain 35 be interpreted, except that the Pole is something
Line of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t
difficult or impossible to attain which must
5 know yet what form it will take, since I do not
nevertheless be sought for, because man is
understand quite what it is that the yearning desires. condemned to seek out and know everything
For the first time there is borne in upon me the full whether or not the knowledge gives him pleasure. In
truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour 40 short, it is the same unthinking lust for knowledge
ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not that drove our First Parents out of the garden.
10 entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery
And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this
of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand
moment; its clockwork has moved exactly toward on! What would you find? Exactly nothing.
this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from 45 A point precisely identical to all the others in a
the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am completely featureless wasteland stretching around it
15 carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile,
for hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a
or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman
the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The
supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers 50 wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily
and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see. northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us,
20 Nobody has succeeded in this thing, and many have
perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their
died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing
this moment and no other when the south wind
will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of
eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my
, teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of
...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
4
my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and
55 poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men. The sentence in lines 10-13 (“For years . . . other”)
What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not mainly serves to
an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The A) expose a side of the narrator that he prefers to
doctor was right, even though I dislike him. keep hidden.
Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what B) demonstrate that the narrator thinks in a
60 I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a methodical and scientific manner.
surrender to it.
C) show that the narrator feels himself to be
influenced by powerful and independent forces.
1 D) emphasize the length of time during which the
narrator has prepared for his expedition.
Over the course of the passage, the narrator’s attitude
shifts from
A) fear about the expedition to excitement about it. 5
B) doubt about his abilities to confidence in them. The narrator indicates that many previous explorers
C) uncertainty of his motives to recognition of seeking the North Pole have
them. A) perished in the attempt.
D) disdain for the North Pole to appreciation of it. B) made surprising discoveries.
C) failed to determine its exact location.
2 D) had different motivations than his own.
Which choice provides the best evidence for the
answer to the previous question?
6
A) Lines 10-12 (“For . . . moment”)
Which choice provides the best evidence for the
B) Lines 21-25 (“Yet . . . will”) answer to the previous question?
C) Lines 42-44 (“And . . . stand on”) A) Lines 20-21 (“Nobody . . . died”)
D) Lines 56-57 (“What . . . myself”) B) Lines 25-27 (“All . . . out”)
C) Lines 31-34 (“The . . . newspaper”)
3 D) Lines 51-53 (“Behind . . . bedsteads”)
As used in lines 1-2, “not readily verifiable” most
nearly means
7
A) unable to be authenticated.
Which choice best describes the narrator’s view of
B) likely to be contradicted. his expedition to the North Pole?
C) without empirical support. A) Immoral but inevitable
D) not completely understood. B) Absurd but necessary
C) Socially beneficial but misunderstood
D) Scientifically important but hazardous
Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal. 3 CONTINUE
, Questions 11-21 are based on the following
...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
8
passage and supplementary material.
The question the narrator asks in lines 30-31
(“Will it . . . railway”) most nearly implies that This passage is adapted from Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great
Inversion and the Future of the American City. ©2013 by
A) balloons will never replace other modes of Vintage. Ehrenhalt is an urbanologist—a scholar of cities
transportation. and their development. Demographic inversion is a
B) the North Pole is farther away than the cities phenomenon that describes the rearrangement of living
usually reached by train. patterns throughout a metropolitan area.
C) people often travel from one city to another We are not witnessing the abandonment of the
without considering the implications. suburbs, or a movement of millions of people back to
the city all at once. The 2010 census certainly did not
D) reaching the North Pole has no foreseeable
Line turn up evidence of a middle-class stampede to the
benefit to humanity.
5 nation’s cities. The news was mixed: Some of the
larger cities on the East Coast tended to gain
population, albeit in small increments. Those in the
9 Midwest, including Chicago, tended to lose
As used in line 49, “take the slightest interest in” substantial numbers. The cities that showed gains in
most nearly means 10 overall population during the entire decade tended to
A) accept responsibility for. be in the South and Southwest. But when it comes to
measuring demographic inversion, raw census
B) possess little regard for. numbers are an ineffective blunt instrument. A closer
C) pay no attention to. look at the results shows that the most powerful
15 demographic events of the past decade were the
D) have curiosity about.
movement of African Americans out of central cities
(180,000 of them in Chicago alone) and the
settlement of immigrant groups in suburbs, often
10
ones many miles distant from downtown.
As used in line 50, “bearing” most nearly means 20 Central-city areas that gained affluent residents in
A) carrying. the first part of the decade maintained that
population in the recession years from 2007 to 2009.
B) affecting. They also, according to a 2011 study by Brookings,
C) yielding. suffered considerably less from increased
D) enduring. 25 unemployment than the suburbs did. Not many
young professionals moved to new downtown
condos in the recession years because few such
residences were being built. But there is no reason to
believe that the demographic trends prevailing prior
30 to the construction bust will not resume once that
bust is over. It is important to remember that
demographic inversion is not a proxy for population
growth; it can occur in cities that are growing, those
whose numbers are flat, and even in those
35 undergoing a modest decline in size.
America’s major cities face enormous fiscal
problems, many of them the result of public pension
obligations they incurred in the more prosperous
years of the past two decades. Some, Chicago
, 40 prominent among them, simply are not producing where the commercial life of the metropolis was
...............................................................................................................................................................
enough revenue to support the level of public conducted; it had a factory district just beyond; it had
services to which most of the citizens have grown to districts of working-class residences just beyond that;
feel entitled. How the cities are going to solve this 70 and it had residential suburbs for the wealthy and the
problem, I do not know. What I do know is that if upper middle class at the far end of the continuum.
45 fiscal crisis were going to drive affluent professionals As a family moved up the economic ladder, it also
out of central cities, it would have done so by now. moved outward from crowded working-class
There is no evidence that it has. districts to more spacious apartments and,
The truth is that we are living at a moment in 75 eventually, to a suburban home. The suburbs of
which the massive outward migration of the affluent Burgess’s time bore little resemblance to those at the
50 that characterized the second half of the end of the twentieth century, but the theory still
twentieth century is coming to an end. And we need essentially worked. People moved ahead in life by
to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and moving farther out.
urban mobility as a result. 80 But in the past decade, in quite a few places, this
Much of our perspective on the process of model has ceased to describe reality. There are still
55 metropolitan settlement dates, whether we realize it downtown commercial districts, but there are no
or not, from a paper written in 1925 by the factory districts lying next to them. There are
University of Chicago sociologist Ernest W. Burgess. scarcely any factories at all. These close-in parts of
It was Burgess who defined four urban/suburban 85 the city, whose few residents Burgess described as
zones of settlement: a central business district; an dwelling in “submerged regions of poverty,
60 area of manufacturing just beyond it; then a degradation and disease,” are increasingly the
residential area inhabited by the industrial and preserve of the affluent who work in the commercial
immigrant working class; and finally an outer core. And just as crucially newcomers to America are
enclave of single-family dwellings. 90 not settling on the inside and accumulating the
Burgess was right about the urban America of resources to move out; they are living in the suburbs
65 1925; he was right about the urban America of 1974. from day one.
Virtually every city in the country had a downtown,
United States Population by Metropolitan Size/Status, 1980 –2010
Chart 1 Chart 2
2010 Population Shares Growth Rates by Metro Size
by Metro Size (%) 1980 –1990
16%
14.3 1990 –2000
14% 12.5 13.1
non- 2000 –2010
metro 12% 10.9 10.3
16.4% 10% 8.8 9.0
8%
small
metro 6% 4.5
large metro 4%
18.0% 65.6%
2% 1.8
0%
large metro small metro non-metro
(>500k) (<500k)
Adapted from William H. Frey, “Population Growth in Metro America since 1980: Putting the Volatile 2000s in Perspective.” Published 2012 by Metropolitan
Policy Program, Brookings Institution.
Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal. 5 CONTINUE
Reading Test
65 MINUTES, 52 QUESTIONS
Turn to Section 1 of your answer sheet to answer the questions in this section.
DIRECTIONS
Each passage or pair of passages below is followed by a number of questions. After reading
each passage or pair, choose the best answer to each question based on what is stated or
implied in the passage or passages and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or
graph).
Questions 1-10 are based on the following 25 fate into the servant of my will. All this I understand,
.......................................................................................................................................................................................................
passage. as I understand each detail of the technique by which
This passage is adapted from MacDonald Harris,
this is carried out. What I don’t understand is why I
The Balloonist. ©2011 by The Estate of Donald Heiney. am so intent on going to this particular place. Who
During the summer of 1897, the narrator of this story, a wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat
fictional Swedish scientist, has set out for the North Pole 30 it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg to Malmö like
in a hydrogen-powered balloon. a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from
their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is
My emotions are complicated and not beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read
readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to
simultaneously a pleasure and a pain. I am certain 35 be interpreted, except that the Pole is something
Line of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t
difficult or impossible to attain which must
5 know yet what form it will take, since I do not
nevertheless be sought for, because man is
understand quite what it is that the yearning desires. condemned to seek out and know everything
For the first time there is borne in upon me the full whether or not the knowledge gives him pleasure. In
truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour 40 short, it is the same unthinking lust for knowledge
ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not that drove our First Parents out of the garden.
10 entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery
And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this
of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand
moment; its clockwork has moved exactly toward on! What would you find? Exactly nothing.
this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from 45 A point precisely identical to all the others in a
the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am completely featureless wasteland stretching around it
15 carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile,
for hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a
or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman
the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The
supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers 50 wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily
and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see. northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us,
20 Nobody has succeeded in this thing, and many have
perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their
died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing
this moment and no other when the south wind
will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of
eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my
, teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of
...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
4
my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and
55 poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men. The sentence in lines 10-13 (“For years . . . other”)
What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not mainly serves to
an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The A) expose a side of the narrator that he prefers to
doctor was right, even though I dislike him. keep hidden.
Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what B) demonstrate that the narrator thinks in a
60 I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a methodical and scientific manner.
surrender to it.
C) show that the narrator feels himself to be
influenced by powerful and independent forces.
1 D) emphasize the length of time during which the
narrator has prepared for his expedition.
Over the course of the passage, the narrator’s attitude
shifts from
A) fear about the expedition to excitement about it. 5
B) doubt about his abilities to confidence in them. The narrator indicates that many previous explorers
C) uncertainty of his motives to recognition of seeking the North Pole have
them. A) perished in the attempt.
D) disdain for the North Pole to appreciation of it. B) made surprising discoveries.
C) failed to determine its exact location.
2 D) had different motivations than his own.
Which choice provides the best evidence for the
answer to the previous question?
6
A) Lines 10-12 (“For . . . moment”)
Which choice provides the best evidence for the
B) Lines 21-25 (“Yet . . . will”) answer to the previous question?
C) Lines 42-44 (“And . . . stand on”) A) Lines 20-21 (“Nobody . . . died”)
D) Lines 56-57 (“What . . . myself”) B) Lines 25-27 (“All . . . out”)
C) Lines 31-34 (“The . . . newspaper”)
3 D) Lines 51-53 (“Behind . . . bedsteads”)
As used in lines 1-2, “not readily verifiable” most
nearly means
7
A) unable to be authenticated.
Which choice best describes the narrator’s view of
B) likely to be contradicted. his expedition to the North Pole?
C) without empirical support. A) Immoral but inevitable
D) not completely understood. B) Absurd but necessary
C) Socially beneficial but misunderstood
D) Scientifically important but hazardous
Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal. 3 CONTINUE
, Questions 11-21 are based on the following
...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
8
passage and supplementary material.
The question the narrator asks in lines 30-31
(“Will it . . . railway”) most nearly implies that This passage is adapted from Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great
Inversion and the Future of the American City. ©2013 by
A) balloons will never replace other modes of Vintage. Ehrenhalt is an urbanologist—a scholar of cities
transportation. and their development. Demographic inversion is a
B) the North Pole is farther away than the cities phenomenon that describes the rearrangement of living
usually reached by train. patterns throughout a metropolitan area.
C) people often travel from one city to another We are not witnessing the abandonment of the
without considering the implications. suburbs, or a movement of millions of people back to
the city all at once. The 2010 census certainly did not
D) reaching the North Pole has no foreseeable
Line turn up evidence of a middle-class stampede to the
benefit to humanity.
5 nation’s cities. The news was mixed: Some of the
larger cities on the East Coast tended to gain
population, albeit in small increments. Those in the
9 Midwest, including Chicago, tended to lose
As used in line 49, “take the slightest interest in” substantial numbers. The cities that showed gains in
most nearly means 10 overall population during the entire decade tended to
A) accept responsibility for. be in the South and Southwest. But when it comes to
measuring demographic inversion, raw census
B) possess little regard for. numbers are an ineffective blunt instrument. A closer
C) pay no attention to. look at the results shows that the most powerful
15 demographic events of the past decade were the
D) have curiosity about.
movement of African Americans out of central cities
(180,000 of them in Chicago alone) and the
settlement of immigrant groups in suburbs, often
10
ones many miles distant from downtown.
As used in line 50, “bearing” most nearly means 20 Central-city areas that gained affluent residents in
A) carrying. the first part of the decade maintained that
population in the recession years from 2007 to 2009.
B) affecting. They also, according to a 2011 study by Brookings,
C) yielding. suffered considerably less from increased
D) enduring. 25 unemployment than the suburbs did. Not many
young professionals moved to new downtown
condos in the recession years because few such
residences were being built. But there is no reason to
believe that the demographic trends prevailing prior
30 to the construction bust will not resume once that
bust is over. It is important to remember that
demographic inversion is not a proxy for population
growth; it can occur in cities that are growing, those
whose numbers are flat, and even in those
35 undergoing a modest decline in size.
America’s major cities face enormous fiscal
problems, many of them the result of public pension
obligations they incurred in the more prosperous
years of the past two decades. Some, Chicago
, 40 prominent among them, simply are not producing where the commercial life of the metropolis was
...............................................................................................................................................................
enough revenue to support the level of public conducted; it had a factory district just beyond; it had
services to which most of the citizens have grown to districts of working-class residences just beyond that;
feel entitled. How the cities are going to solve this 70 and it had residential suburbs for the wealthy and the
problem, I do not know. What I do know is that if upper middle class at the far end of the continuum.
45 fiscal crisis were going to drive affluent professionals As a family moved up the economic ladder, it also
out of central cities, it would have done so by now. moved outward from crowded working-class
There is no evidence that it has. districts to more spacious apartments and,
The truth is that we are living at a moment in 75 eventually, to a suburban home. The suburbs of
which the massive outward migration of the affluent Burgess’s time bore little resemblance to those at the
50 that characterized the second half of the end of the twentieth century, but the theory still
twentieth century is coming to an end. And we need essentially worked. People moved ahead in life by
to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and moving farther out.
urban mobility as a result. 80 But in the past decade, in quite a few places, this
Much of our perspective on the process of model has ceased to describe reality. There are still
55 metropolitan settlement dates, whether we realize it downtown commercial districts, but there are no
or not, from a paper written in 1925 by the factory districts lying next to them. There are
University of Chicago sociologist Ernest W. Burgess. scarcely any factories at all. These close-in parts of
It was Burgess who defined four urban/suburban 85 the city, whose few residents Burgess described as
zones of settlement: a central business district; an dwelling in “submerged regions of poverty,
60 area of manufacturing just beyond it; then a degradation and disease,” are increasingly the
residential area inhabited by the industrial and preserve of the affluent who work in the commercial
immigrant working class; and finally an outer core. And just as crucially newcomers to America are
enclave of single-family dwellings. 90 not settling on the inside and accumulating the
Burgess was right about the urban America of resources to move out; they are living in the suburbs
65 1925; he was right about the urban America of 1974. from day one.
Virtually every city in the country had a downtown,
United States Population by Metropolitan Size/Status, 1980 –2010
Chart 1 Chart 2
2010 Population Shares Growth Rates by Metro Size
by Metro Size (%) 1980 –1990
16%
14.3 1990 –2000
14% 12.5 13.1
non- 2000 –2010
metro 12% 10.9 10.3
16.4% 10% 8.8 9.0
8%
small
metro 6% 4.5
large metro 4%
18.0% 65.6%
2% 1.8
0%
large metro small metro non-metro
(>500k) (<500k)
Adapted from William H. Frey, “Population Growth in Metro America since 1980: Putting the Volatile 2000s in Perspective.” Published 2012 by Metropolitan
Policy Program, Brookings Institution.
Unauthorized copying or reuse of any part of this page is illegal. 5 CONTINUE
