Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 25

A barbershop quartet rivalry, a drone racing cheating scandal, and a mosaic restoration studio's adhesive test each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.25. Eighteen Digital SAT-format questions walk through every Reading and Writing skill, from word meaning to cross-text evidence.

CRAMBOOKNOTES Digital SAT Practice

Digital SAT Passage Practice

Set 25 Full Domain Practice From Ep.25 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.25 First All Digital SAT Practice

The Digital SAT Reading and Writing section is built from short passages, usually 25 to 150 words, with one question attached to each. Two of the four content domains, Craft and Structure and Information and Ideas, make up more than half the test and cover several distinct skills, not just vocabulary. This set covers every skill inside both domains, from Words in Context and Text Structure to Cross-Text Connections, Central Ideas, Command of Evidence, and Inferences, using the same ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.25 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 25 pulls its passages from a mix of hobbyist and professional scenarios: a barbershop quartet's old rivalry, a talkative antique map dealer, an underfunded woodturning workshop, a drone racing scandal, and a stagnant soap-making business, along with a handful of settings involving a wildlife photography award, a mosaic restoration committee, a puppet theater rehearsal, a leathercraft workshop, and a samba percussion group. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.25 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Ep.25's words split across the emotional spectrum: ebullient and pithy lean positive, describing enthusiasm and meaningful brevity, while antipathy, garrulous, meager, quibble, reprehensible, stagnant, and vex lean negative, describing hostility, excessive talk, scarcity, pettiness, wrongdoing, inactivity, and irritation. Nostalgic stays closer to neutral, describing wistful memory without being inherently good or bad. Sorting a word's charge before reading closely is often the fastest way to eliminate two wrong answers.

Read each passage once, answer, and check the explanation regardless of whether you got it right. The explanations point to the exact phrase in the passage that the correct answer depends on, which is the habit that separates strong readers from students who are guessing.

Words in Context - Definitions

These five questions test whether you can identify a word's precise meaning using only the sentence around it. The scenarios range from a barbershop quartet rivalry to a stagnant soap-making business.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

Decades after their falling out over a disputed competition score, the two former barbershop quartet members still couldn't hide their mutual antipathy whenever they crossed paths at regional festivals.

As used in the text, "antipathy" most nearly means

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

Collectors visiting the antique map dealer's shop often left an hour later than planned, drawn in by his garrulous stories about the origin of each map, whether they asked for the history or not.

As used in the text, "garrulous" most nearly means

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

The community woodturning workshop survived on a meager annual grant that barely covered lathe maintenance, let alone the new equipment the growing membership needed.

As used in the text, "meager" most nearly means

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

League officials called the pilot's decision to secretly modify his drone's speed controller reprehensible, a violation that undermined the trust every other racer placed in the rulebook.

As used in the text, "reprehensible" most nearly means

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

After three years of identical scent offerings, the small-batch soap maker admitted her product line had grown stagnant, with repeat customers increasingly buying from newer competitors instead.

As used in the text, "stagnant" most nearly means

Words in Context - Complete the Text

Instead of a highlighted word, these three questions leave a blank and ask you to choose the word that fits the sentence's logic, using ebullient, quibble, and vex.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

The wildlife photographer could barely contain her ______ reaction when she learned her image of a diving falcon had won the international competition's top prize.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

Committee members spent the entire meeting continuing to ______ over which shade of blue tile most closely matched the mosaic's original 1920s pattern, delaying the restoration by another month.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

A single stuck marionette string continued to ______ the puppeteer throughout technical rehearsal, forcing her to pause the scene three separate times to free the tangled wire.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?

Text Structure and Purpose

These two questions step back from single words and ask how a passage is organized, or what a specific sentence is doing within it, using a leathercraft exhibit and a samba percussion group's rehearsal test.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

A leathercraft exhibit's introductory panel credits a single workshop with reviving the centuries-old technique of vegetable tanning in the region. A brief note added after the exhibit's opening acknowledges that at least two smaller workshops had been quietly using the same method for years before receiving any public recognition.

Which choice best describes the function of the added note in the text as a whole?

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

Two samba percussion groups preparing for the same citywide parade rehearsed differently this season, one adding weekly small-section practice and the other rehearsing only as a full group. Judges rated the small-section group's rhythmic precision only slightly higher, not enough to change the parade ranking. Audience energy told a very different story, with the small-section group scoring far higher.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Cross-Text Connections

These two questions present two short, related passages and ask how one would likely respond to a claim made in the other, using a drone racing sponsorship claim and an antique map's authenticity.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Lower entry fees for racers under eighteen, introduced through a new sponsorship deal, explain why youth registration climbed recently, according to a drone racing league spokesperson.

Text 2

Social media analytics from the same period show a popular racing livestream also gained triple its usual viewership among teenagers during the same months, exposure the league's own report does not mention.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the spokesperson's claim in Text 1?

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

An antique map dealer's catalog attributes a rare map's high asking price to its confirmed origin from a well-documented seventeenth-century printing house.

Text 2

An independent paper conservator who examined the same map found watermark evidence suggesting the paper stock was manufactured at least thirty years after the printing house ceased operations.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse nostalgic and pithy from Vocab Ep.25, this time asking what the passage means as a whole rather than what one word means.

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

Hearing the old arrangement again for the first time in twenty years, the retired barbershop singer grew visibly nostalgic, humming along under his breath before admitting he still remembered every harmony.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

The woodturning instructor's advice to nervous beginners was famously pithy: let the wood tell you what it wants to become, a single sentence that somehow covered grain direction, patience, and technique all at once.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the instructor's advice?

Command of Evidence

These two questions give you a claim and ask which piece of evidence would most directly support it, a skill that shows up constantly in the Information and Ideas domain.

Question 15 of 18 Information and Ideas

A soap maker believes cold-process soap retains more natural fragrance from essential oils than hot-process soap made with the same ingredients.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the soap maker's belief?

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

A barbershop quartet's musical director believes a fifth monthly rehearsal has improved the group's harmonic blend rather than simply giving members more time to memorize lyrics.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the director's argument?

Inferences

These two questions close the set with an unfinished passage and ask you to complete the logical conclusion the evidence supports, without overreaching beyond what the passage actually shows.

Question 17 of 18 Information and Ideas

When a leathercraft workshop began offering a faster chrome-tanning option alongside its traditional vegetable tanning, staff assumed customers would prefer the quicker, cheaper option. After two years, however, sales records show vegetable-tanned pieces consistently outsell chrome-tanned pieces by a wide margin despite costing more and taking longer to produce. This finding suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

Drone racing course designers typically include a dozen different obstacle types to test varied piloting skills, yet race data from one popular circuit shows that finishing times among skilled pilots vary most dramatically at just two obstacle types, a tight tunnel turn and an inverted gate, while times on the other ten obstacles stay remarkably similar across pilots. One reasonable inference is that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

out of 18 correct

Question Distribution by Skill

How This Set Is Built

Set 25 covers every skill inside Craft and Structure and Information and Ideas, the two domains that together make up more than half of the Reading and Writing section. It draws on Ep.25's cluster of words describing speech and sentiment, garrulous and pithy sit at opposite ends of the same idea, too many words versus exactly enough, while antipathy and ebullient anchor the negative and positive extremes of feeling. The two Central Ideas questions close the vocabulary loop by reusing nostalgic and pithy, this time asking what the passage means rather than what the word means.

Every passage in this set was written specifically for these ten words. None are adapted from outside sources, and none repeat across other sets in this series.

Skill	Domain	Questions
Words in Context - Definitions	Craft and Structure	5
Words in Context - Complete the Text	Craft and Structure	3
Text Structure and Purpose	Craft and Structure	2
Cross-Text Connections	Craft and Structure	2
Central Ideas and Details	Information and Ideas	2
Command of Evidence	Information and Ideas	2
Inferences	Information and Ideas	2

Where Students Lose Points on This Set

Words in Context questions are usually missed for one of two reasons: either the reader focuses only on the highlighted word and ignores the surrounding clause that explains it, or they pick an answer that matches their own memorized definition instead of the meaning the sentence actually supports. In this set, words like garrulous and reprehensible work the same way: the correct choice always traces back to a specific phrase in the passage, never to outside knowledge of the word.

Cross-Text Connections trips up students who assume the second text will always agree with the first. In both Question 11 and Question 12 here, Text 2 complicates or questions an assumption in Text 1 rather than confirming it, which is the more common relationship on the actual exam than most students expect.

Command of Evidence questions are missed most often when a student picks the answer that sounds true in general rather than the one that tests the specific claim being made. Question 15's correct answer is the only choice that measures the exact outcome, fragrance strength, that the soap maker's belief depends on. The other three choices are all plausible facts that simply do not address that claim.

Reviewed by the CramBookNotes SAT prep team as part of the Digital SAT Passage Practice series.

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