Free SAT Section 1 Critical Reading: Section One Critical Reading Exam Questions and Answers

Answer the questions on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passages. Passage 1 is by a museum curator. Passage 2 is by a historian. Passage 1 1 Digitizing a museum's collection is often 2 dismissed as a poor substitute for standing before the 3 real object. This misses the point. Few people can 4 travel to the archive where a rare medieval 5 manuscript is kept, and fewer still are permitted to 6 handle it. A high-resolution scan lets a student in a 7 distant town turn the pages, zoom in on the 8 marginal notes, and compare them with other texts. Passage 2 9 Scans are undeniably useful, but I worry about what 10 we lose when they become the default. A screen 11 flattens a manuscript: it hides the texture of the 12 parchment, the faint odor of age, and the sheer 13 physical scale that tell a scholar how the book was 14 used. Students raised on scans may never learn to 15 ask questions that only the object itself can raise. Which statement best describes the relationship between the two passages?

• AA. Passage 2 grants the value of the practice defended in Passage 1 but raises a concern that Passage 1 does not address.
• BB. Passage 2 offers a historical example that illustrates the general argument made in Passage 1.
• CC. Passage 2 restates the position of Passage 1 in more specialized terms for scholarly readers.
• DD. Passage 2 proposes a technical remedy for a limitation of scanning that Passage 1 identifies.
• EE. Passage 2 disputes the factual claims in Passage 1 about who can gain access to rare manuscripts.

Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. The following passage is adapted from an essay by a naturalist who lives in a large city. 1 When I moved to the city, I assumed the pigeons 2 on my block were a single undifferentiated mass, 3 as interchangeable as coins. Within a month I knew 4 better. One bird, missing two toes on its left foot, 5 arrived each morning on my fire escape; another, 6 nearly white, bullied the others away from crumbs. 7 My neighbors, who regard the birds as vermin, find 8 my attention absurd. Perhaps it is. But I have come 9 to suspect that contempt is largely a failure of 10 observation, and that what we dismiss as common is 11 often merely what we have not looked at closely. The primary purpose of the passage is to

• AA. argue that disdain for ordinary things often reflects a lack of careful attention
• BB. defend the author's interest in pigeons against the objections of neighbors
• CC. recount how the author came to recognize individual pigeons on one city block
• DD. describe the pecking order that governs a flock of urban pigeons
• EE. contrast the attitudes of city dwellers with those of trained naturalists

Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The assembly manual was so ------- that even mechanics with decades of experience had to call the manufacturer for help deciphering it.

• AA. succinct
• BB. lucid
• CC. exhaustive
• DD. pedestrian
• EE. abstruse

The senator's public remarks about the transit bill were -------, yet her private correspondence, which expressed deep reservations, suggests that her support was largely -------.

• AA. candid . . halfhearted
• BB. glowing . . feigned
• CC. enthusiastic . . genuine
• DD. hostile . . lukewarm
• EE. restrained . . unwavering

Because the island's native species evolved in -------, many of them are ------- to diseases carried in by visiting ships.

• AA. isolation . . vulnerable
• BB. competition . . resistant
• CC. harmony . . indifferent
• DD. isolation . . immune
• EE. abundance . . susceptible

Because the newly identified frog is so -------, appearing only at night along a few remote streams, researchers have rarely managed to observe it.

• AA. elusive
• BB. conspicuous
• CC. aggressive
• DD. abundant
• EE. ornate

The editor's revisions were so ------- that the author, who had expected only minor corrections, scarcely recognized her own essay.

• AA. tentative
• BB. flattering
• CC. belated
• DD. cosmetic
• EE. sweeping

Unlike her ------- brother, who spoke freely about his feelings, Maya rarely revealed what she was thinking.

• AA. secretive
• BB. expressive
• CC. stoic
• DD. reticent
• EE. meticulous

The passage below is from an essay by a translator of poetry. Translators of poetry are often accused of betrayal, as though a poem were a vault and the translator a thief. I find the charge unfair, though not entirely without merit. No translation reproduces the sound of the 5 original; the music of one language simply does not survive transport into another. But to conclude that the poem is therefore lost is to confuse a loss with a transformation. What arrives in the new language is a different object, one that can still move a reader who 10 would otherwise never have encountered the poet at all. The author's attitude toward the accusation described in lines 1-3 is best described as

• AA. outraged rejection
• BB. detached neutrality
• CC. amused indifference
• DD. resigned acceptance
• EE. partial disagreement

The passage below is adapted from a history of medical instruments. In 1816, a French physician named René Laennec was asked to examine a young woman whose symptoms suggested heart disease. Custom called for placing an ear directly against the patient's chest, but modesty made 5 that impractical. Laennec recalled having seen children tapping messages on opposite ends of a wooden beam and rolled a sheet of paper into a tube. To his surprise, the sounds of the heart came through more clearly than they ever had by the bare ear. Within a few years he had 10 replaced the paper with a hollow wooden cylinder and begun cataloguing the noises of the lungs, work that gave medicine a vocabulary it had previously lacked. The passage primarily serves to

• AA. describe how an awkward problem led to an instrument that changed diagnosis
• BB. contrast the examination methods of Laennec with those of other physicians of his era
• CC. explain why sound travels more clearly through hollow objects than through open air
• DD. argue that concerns about modesty slowed medical progress in nineteenth-century France
• EE. praise Laennec's patience in studying diseases of the heart and lungs over many years