Digital SAT Actual Test (202403A)

The following text is adapted from Willa Cather’s 1912 novel Alexander’s Bridge. For the next few days Alexander was very busy. He took a desk in the office of a [Scottish] engineering firm on Henrietta Street, and was at work almost constantly. He avoided the clubs and usually dined alone at his hotel.

Radiocarbon dating can help scientists determine whether the extinction of the giant short-faced bear around 8000 BCE ____ the arrival of humans in the same region of the Americas. If instead the giant short-faced bear died out before humans could have altered its habitat, that suggests that its extinction was the result of some other factor, such as change in sea levels as a result of glaciers retreating.

Economists often assert that countries looking to increase their reliance on solar energy should expand their capacity for storage; having an ample reserve of stored energy can mitigate the effects of ___ solar energy collection caused by unpredictable shifts in cloud cover and haze.

Few religious buildings can be said to ___ the astonishing size of Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Mosque in Malaysia, which, with the capacity to accommodate approximately 24,000 people at once, is one of the largest mosques in the world.

In the United States, historians of the American Revolution once had a tendency to approach their subject with ____: they had so much admiration for the people who carried out the revolution that they were far from objective in their scholarship.

The following text is from the 1895 poem “Marshlands” by Emily Pauline Johnson, a Kanienkahagen (Mohawk) writer also known as Tekahionwake. Among the wild rice in the still lagoon. In monotone the lizard shrills his tune. The wild goose, homing, seeks a sheltering. Where rushes grow, and oozing lichens cling. Late cranes with heavy wing, and lazy flight, Sail up the silence with the nearing night. And like a spirit, swathed in some soft veil. Steals twilight and its shadows o’er the swale. Hushed lie the sedges, and the vapours creep. Thick, grey and humid, while the marshes sleep.

President Richard Nixon is most famous for his participation in the 1970s Watergate political scandal, a convoluted tale of criminality and eroded ethics involving a constellation of associates such as Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and Nixon’s personal friend Charles “Bebe” Rebozo. But Nixon’s legacy is complex: he has been praised for his role in opening relations between the United States and China, and he once made an attempt at reforming United States health care policy that is arguably a precursor to the Affordable Care Act, which became law during the Barack Obama administration.

Thermal technologies have been used in the food industry for over 100 years, providing a way of preserving food in large batches. Recent advancements in ohmic heating were made through research in Chile on the preservation of strawberries. Ohmic heating is generally considered to be an improvement over more conventional thermal preservation methods: whereas conventional methods transfer energy from the surface of a good to its interior, ohmic heating passes electric current through food products to generate heat within the food itself.

The following text is from Julia Alvarez’s 2000 novel In the Name of Salomé. Salomé, a poet, is hosting guests in the front parlor of her family home, and Ramona is her sister. A salon is a social gathering for the exploration of intellectual ideas. It was evening when the two men got up to leave. Tía Ana had already come into the room several times to see if these guests had departed yet. The front parlor had always been her special province, as she used it for her little school. Now, every evening, it turned into Salomé’s salon, as Ramona called it, and it was never in order for its transformation back to a classroom the following morning.

Mexican textile artist Victoria Villasana weaves stories of triumph, using her unique method of applying colorful yarn to photographs of people. In some works, Villasana focuses on celebrating cultural icons who are people of color, as she does in her depiction of musician and composer Prince. However, in other works, Villasana honors ordinary people, as she does in her captivating portrayal of a young girl sitting on a sidewalk. Villasana sees both of these approaches as ways of depicting the power and interconnectedness of all people.

Total Areas of Five Pueblo Nations in New Mexico Tribal Nation

[Graph: Days per Winter That Lakes Have Surface Ice. Three lines plotted from 1980-81 to 2005-06 for Näckten, Lake Kegonsa, and Spirit Lake.] It is common for freshwater lakes near or above a latitude of 45° north of the equator, like Lake Mjosa in Norway, to accumulate surface ice in winter. The amount of duration of ice depends on many factors, including local weather conditions as well as the lake’s depth, volume, and surface area, but a climate researcher claims that some lakes in these latitudes have seen a decline in the duration of ice between the early 1980s and the mid 2000s.

[Table: Highest-Grossing Films in a Language Other than English at US Box Office. Columns: Title, Lifetime gross, Opening weekend, US release date, Director, Oscar Nominated?] The Lives of Others

Rue du Petit-Champlain in Québec City, Canada, is a pedestrianized street—it is closed to car traffic except in special circumstances. Students in Québec City surveyed residents about a proposal to increase the amount of car traffic allowed on Rue du Petit-Champlain. The survey results suggest that residents are generally against the proposal, and the students claim that much of the survey respondents’ opposition stems from concerns that allowing more car traffic would diminish the distinctive character of the street.

Arthurian legends (tales related to the character of King Arthur) derive from many sources, such as Preiddeu Annwfin, composed around 900, and Erec and Enide from around 1170. One of the most significant sources, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, was written in the 1130s; some material from it was later adapted by the Norman poet Wace into the Roman de Brut in 1155. But while the Roman de Brut includes references to the famous Round Table at which Arthur’s knights assembled, nothing written before 1155 does, which suggests that _____

Azulejos, mosaics made of glazed ceramic tiles, can be found throughout Portugal. These mosaics beautify places such as _____ stations, and public squares.

On February 1, 2018, Florida-based researchers Martha A. Scholl, Maoya Bassiouni, and Angel I. Torres-Sánchez ____ climate data from several sites in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Mountains. At 12:00 a.m., the air temperature was 15.6°C at site CC1, the site with the highest elevation, and it had shifted to 16.2°C by 6:00 p.m.

Writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s love of short fiction began when she read a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories as a child, and she would develop into a prolific short story writer herself, publishing pieces like “Return” (2008) and “Water” (2007). Yet she’s become, with the breakout success of her 2020 novel Mexican _____ best known as a novelist.

Featuring works by the photographers Dora Maar and Rogi André, the 2021 exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera set out to provide a wide-ranging overview of photography by women in the 1920s through the _____ given the collection’s breadth of more than 120 photos, its efforts were largely successful.

Margaret Wendell Huntington and Nessa Cohen were among the 300 artists who exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, a groundbreaking New York City art exhibition that introduced modernism to American audiences. Though now canonical, many works featured in the show—particularly one abstract cubist painting by Marcel Duchamp—_____ considered shocking at the time.

Along the hallowed walls of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art hangs 36.5-by-28.5-inch oil ____ which was created in 1944 by American artist Enrico Donati.

Humans inherit specific physical traits (like having type O or type AB blood) from their parents. _____ cats inherit specific physical traits (like having short or long fur) from their parents.

Author Ursula K. Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World is a science fiction story set in an era of intergalactic travel, whereas her The Tombs of Atuan is a work of fantasy set in a land of heroes and dragons. _____ both fans of science fiction and fans of fantasy are among her many readers.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: ● Spinach is a vegetable that contains ascorbic acid, an essential nutrient for humans. ● There is 30 milligrams (mg) of ascorbic acid in every 100 grams (g) of spinach. ● Cauliflower is a vegetable that contains ascorbic acid. ● There is 48 mg of ascorbic acid in every 100 g of cauliflower. ● Humans cannot make ascorbic acid in their bodies, so they must get it from foods, including fruits and vegetables. ● Ascorbic acid is also known as vitamin C. The student wants to emphasize a similarity between spinach and cauliflower.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: ● In 2022, University of Miami researchers discovered brine pools in the Gulf of Aqaba. ● A brine pool is an underwater lake that sits on the ocean floor. ● The water in brine pools is three to eight times saltier than the surrounding ocean. ● The extreme saltiness of this water makes it toxic to most sea life. ● Some forms of bacteria are able to survive in brine pools. The student wants to explain why brine pools are toxic to most sea life.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: ● Dysphania pusillia is a plant species. ● It was believed to be extinct until a living specimen was identified in New Zealand in 2015. ● Pseudorca crassidens is a mammal species. ● It was believed to be extinct until a living specimen was identified in Denmark in 1861. ● They are considered Lazarus species. ● “Lazarus species” is a term for living species of organisms that were once believed to be extinct. The student wants to specify where Dysphania pusillia was identified.

● Marine biology is primarily the study of sea life. ● Mary Jane Rathbun was an American marine biologist born in 1860. ● She is known for her research on freshwater crabs. ● Ornithology is primarily the study of birds. ● Emile Snethlage was a German-Brazilian ornithologist born in 1868. ● She is known for her research on Brazilian birds. The student wants to emphasize a similarity between Rathbun and Snethlage.

A number of recording artists combine indigenous music with other music styles. Choctaw singer-songwriter Samantha Crain masterfully incorporated elements of Choctaw hymns into folk-pop on her single “When We Remain.” Similarly, Wayuu singer-songwriter Lido Pimienta ______ Afro-Indigenous music from Colombia with Latin pop on her album Miss Colombia.

Whether the reign of a French monarch such as Charles VIII or Henry I was considered historically significant or, conversely, relatively ______, its trajectory was shaped by questions of legitimacy and therefore cannot be understood without a corollary understanding of the factors that allowed the monarch to assert a claim to the throne successfully.

Barring major archaeological discoveries, we are unlikely to ever have ____ account of ancient Egypt under the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, as much of the evidence of her reign was deliberately destroyed by her successors.

The Roc-aux-Sorciers frieze—a group of relief carvings of animals found in what is now France and dating from around 14,000 years ago—is sometimes said to be emotionally powerful despite its age, but in fact the frieze is _____ precisely because of its age. It is the link of shared humanity with the artist across so many centuries that gives the Roc-aux-Sorciers frieze such resonance.

Amsterdam has high pedestrian traffic, but simply replicating a feature of Amsterdam associated with walkability—e.g., its high number of relatively short blocks—may be insufficient to induce increased walking in other cities. As urbanists Mariela Alfonzo argues, our understanding of individuals’ decision-making about whether to walk is insufficiently robust: some studies emphasize the role of climate conditions, others the role of recreational amenities, and so on, but walking decisions are made in complex contexts in which multiple conditions and needs inform individuals’ choices.

Text 1 Scholarship today overrepresents formal experimentation, such as William Carlos Williams’s use of minimalistic, image-based structures, well beyond the degree to which it actually influenced US poetry during the modernist period (roughly 1900-1945). Meanwhile, the work of Countee Cullen, who relied on conventional poetic forms associated with previous literary periods, attracts woefully little attention from scholars of modernism. Text 2 Distant reading, or computer-assisted quantitative analysis of massive collections of digitized texts, can reveal stylistic elements that have heretofore escaped notice, despite being shared by numerous texts from the modernist period. For too long, scholars have focused on experimental versus conventional poetic forms, inhibiting inquiry into other points of stylistic correspondence among poems that would enrich our understanding of the modernist canon.

In her 1998 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Y. Davis bases her analysis in part on recordings of songs sung in the 1920s by Gertrude “Ma’’ Rainey and Bessie Smith. Davis focuses on how Rainey and Smith improvised the lyrics—replacing the original lines with mischievous jokes and wordplay. Davis’s work was particularly labor intensive because in order to transcribe, or write down, the lyrics as Rainey and Smith sang them, Davis had to listen repeatedly to the vinyl recordings, which weren’t very clear.

Rafael Núñez and colleagues studied how members of the Yupno, an Indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, conceptualize time. The researchers recorded Yupno speakers explaining certain temporal words and phrases, such as abjuk, a present-oriented expression that translates to "now," and coded each speaker's manual gestures. Previous research has found a tendency in many cultures to make temporal distinctions using spatial concepts and gestures, particularly along egocentric axes (i.e., relative to the orientation of the speaker): for instance, English speakers often refer to the front/back axis to describe events in time. In an anthropology paper, a student claims that the tendency toward ego-based conceptualizations of time is universal.

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raúl Hernández-Pérez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Bran (a border collie), Alma (a mixed breed), and other dogs while the animals listened to three recordings: one of The Little Prince being read in Spanish, the second in Hungarian, and a third made up of short, randomly selected fragments of the first two, scrambled so that they didn't resemble human speech. Each dog was familiar with either Spanish or Hungarian, but not both. The team concluded that differences in dogs' anatomical features may affect their ability to distinguish speech from nonspeech.

The onsets of growing seasons in Alaska have been shifting earlier, potentially enabling increased carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption through greater productivity of mooseberry (Viburnum edule) plants and other vegetation, but also potentially enabling increased CO2 output through greater heterotrophic respiration (CO2 generated by the activity of soil microorganisms). Hydrologist Yonghong Yi and her colleagues modeled seasonal changes in net CO2 in Alaska in a landscape grid of 1 square kilometer (km2) cells and again in a grid of 10 km2 cells, which are finer resolutions than most models of net CO2 have achieved. The researchers concluded that variations in the landscape affect net CO2 in ways that most models are too coarse to capture.

Indigenous songs can be repositories of ecological information, from Yi songs about the natural environment to Tlingit songs about wildlife encounters. Kwakwaka'wakw song keeper Kwaxsistalla Wathl'thla aided research by ethnobiologist Dana Lepofsky et al. by contributing songs that reference creating terraced intertidal gardens to foster the healthy development of clams, a staple in the Kwakwaka'wakw people's diet. Such structures date as far back as 3,500 years ago. Intriguingly, analysis of local paleoecological marine bivalve records has revealed significant increases in clam size and productivity as clam garden practices became more prevalent and harvesting pressure increased – a finding that bolsters the notion that _____

Saeed M.Z.A. Tarabieh conducted a study of consumer attitudes toward Jordanian food and beverage companies and found that for consumers who value environmental conservation, their likelihood of purchasing a product decreased when their perception of the product’s risk of causing environmental harm increased. Subsequently, other researchers conducted a study of various demographic groups in China, investigating participants’ intentions to purchase a new television, and found that, on average, rural residents had the highest perception among all the demographic groups in the study of the environmental risks of the TV. Assuming that the results of Tarabieh's study are broadly applicable, this finding suggests that _______

Quasars—such as APM 08279+5255, located in the Lynx constellation—are extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive black holes, some of which are known to have developed within the first billion years of the formation of the universe. Based on simulations they conducted, astrophysicists Daniel Whalen, Muhammad Latif, and colleagues concluded that these early quasars developed partly as a result of rare convergences of gases in space without the need for ultraviolet backgrounds or other extreme and implausible environmental conditions that models of the early universe have included to account for the presence of these quasars. If this conclusion is correct, it suggests that ______

The present-day city of Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan, was for years the capital of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, one of many nominally autonomous republics within the Soviet Union. Like ____ peer autonomous Soviet socialist republics, the Nakhchivan Republic was established along ethnolinguistic lines: most of the republic's residents spoke Azerbaijani.

Jordan's constitution, enacted in 1952, contains just one of the six constitutional features that enhance judicial independence, as identified by legal scholars James Melton and Tom Ginsburg. After 1985, such de jure judicial independence became more prevalent, as exemplified in Croatia's constitution, enacted in 1991 and ____ four of these features.

The Limón technique, developed by Mexican-born dancer and choreographer Jose Limón, is known for its emphasis on breath control and its interplay of weight and _____ dancers may explore, for example, the moment of mid-air suspension at the top of a jump.

Chondrites are stony meteorites that are undifferentiated—that is, their contents have not melted and separated into distinct layers. They are hardly _____ many chondrites experience aqueous alteration as a result of exposure to fluids, as well as fracturing, veining, and localized melting due to collisions with other objects.

Named for the year in which it was detected by American astronomers, SN 2020fqv was a supernova (the explosion of a massive ____ in the constellation Virgo, 60 million light-years from Earth, the transient yet powerful blast propelled particles and debris into space at extremely high speeds.

Over the years, dozens of architectural and archaeological sites important to Hawaiian history and culture, such as the Haena Archeological Complex and the Bank of Hawaii-Haiku Branch, have been added to the Hawai’i Register of Historic Places, and each year, a review board of experts that includes sociologist Alton Okinaka and architect Katie Stephens gathers to ____ which sites to add next to the growing registry.

Not all plants benefit equally or from the same kind of _____ cucumber and marigold, for example, benefit from endomycorrhizal associations; many tree species, such as pine and oak, benefit from ectomycorrhizal associations; and plants in the Brassica family, such as rutabaga, don't benefit from mycorrhizae at all.

Those who looked up at the right time on September 9, 1904, would have witnessed a total solar eclipse, during which the Moon completely blocks the Sun. ______ stargazers on December 25, 1935, would have seen an annular solar eclipse, during which the Moon blocks most of the Sun and causes it to look like a ring of light.

With many elements, like neon, scientists were able to isolate a relatively pure sample of the substance shortly after discovering its existence—but this wasn't the case with all elements. ______ the isolation process took years. The element erbium, for instance, was discovered in 1843 but not isolated until 1934.

In Tino Villanueva’s 2016 poem "Field of Moving Colors Layered,” the poet contemplates a painting that has inspired him: Alberto Valdés’s 1965 work Untitled. The painting, which features overlapping geometric shapes, fuels the poem's exploration of temporality and identity. ______ in responding to Valdés’s artwork, Villanueva’s poem reflects on the relationship between poetry and other art forms.

● Grimanesa Amoros is a Peruvian American artist. ● She is well known for her large-scale LED light sculptures. ● Substancial (Phase 4) debuted in 2007 at the Hudson River Community Health Center in Peekskill, New York. ● It is made of iridescent multicolored LED domes. ● It occupies 2,816 cubic feet of space. The student wants to emphasize when and where Substancial (Phase 4) debuted.

● Ynés Mexía was a Mexican American botanist. ● Between 1917 and 1938, she collected over 150,000 botanical samples throughout the Americas. ● She collected a sample of Achyrocline vauthieriana in Minas Gerais, Brazil, on May 3, 1930. ● She collected a sample of Vernonia liatroides in Jalisco, Mexico, onFebruary 14, 1927. ● These specimens are members of the Asteraceae family. ● They can now be viewed online at the C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium. The student wants to emphasize when she collected both of the samples.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: ● Thailand’s annual Songkran Water Festival is held each April. ● It marks Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year. ● People splash and spray each other for fun at the festival’s community-wide water fights. ● In Bangkok, thousands gather along Silom Road for the city’s largest water fight. ● In Chiang Mai, thousands gather at a historical monument called the Tha Phae Gate for the city’s largest water fight. The student wants to emphasize a similarity in how people in Bangkok and Chiang Mai celebrate Songkran.

● In a 2012 study, Dybzinski and Tilman tested the effect of plant litter on seedling emergence in a grassland setting. ● Plant litter includes dead leaves and other plant material. ● The test site was a flooded grassland in the United States. ● It was in a temperate midlatitude climate. ● The researchers found that in these environmental conditions the presence of plant litter had a negative effect on seedling emergence. The student wants to specify the test site’s climate.