Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 10

A loan underwriter's careful review, a river cleanup documentary, and a desert caravan route each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.10. 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 10 Full Domain Practice From Ep.10 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.10 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.10 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 10 pulls its passages from a mix of financial and academic scenarios: a loan underwriter's income check, a dense graduate seminar, a real estate negotiation, a vague startup pitch, a cautious group of investors, and a handful of settings involving a river cleanup documentary, complaint resolution methods, paperback book sales, and an urban tree planting initiative. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.10 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Two Ep.10 words, malleable and obstinate, sit at opposite ends of the same idea: malleable describes something easily shaped or influenced, while obstinate describes something that refuses to change at all. Placing new words on a spectrum like this is a useful habit for the whole SAT Vocab series, not just this set.

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 loan underwriter's income check to a wary group of investors.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

Before approving the loan, the underwriter needed to ascertain whether the applicant's reported income actually matched the figures on three years of tax returns.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

The graduate seminar veered into such esoteric details of medieval manuscript binding that only two of the twelve students could follow the discussion without additional background reading.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

The negotiator appeared to feign disinterest in the property, hoping the seller would lower the asking price before revealing how eager she actually was to close the deal.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

The startup's pitch remained nebulous even after the third meeting, offering broad promises about disrupting the industry without ever specifying a concrete product or timeline.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

Investors grew wary of the company after its second missed earnings report in a row, and several began quietly reducing their holdings ahead of the next quarterly call.

As used in the text, "wary" 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 circumvent, malleable, and pertinent.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

The company was accused of ______ safety regulations by labeling the device as a toy rather than medical equipment, allowing it to skip the stricter approval process.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

Copper is prized in wiring partly because it is so ______ that it can be bent and reshaped repeatedly without cracking.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

The witness was asked to limit her testimony to information ______ to the specific transaction under review, rather than describing unrelated events from years earlier.

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 river cleanup documentary and a complaint resolution study.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

A river cleanup effort's dramatic drop in visible pollution within its first year becomes the focus of a new documentary's opening scenes. Through most of the film, the narrator credits that improvement to the volunteer program's newly installed filtration barriers. Only in the closing segment does the narration note that regional rainfall was unusually low that year, reducing the runoff that normally carries debris into the river. That note leaves open how much of the improvement the barriers actually caused.

Which choice best describes the function of the last sentence in the text as a whole?

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

For one month, customer service researchers compared two ways of handling complaints, a scripted response and an open-ended conversation, tracking a separate representative group for each approach. The scripted-response group resolved only slightly more complaints in a single call than the open-ended group, too small to be statistically meaningful. In customer satisfaction ratings, however, the open-ended group scored substantially higher. Because only the response method differed between groups, the study could isolate this distinction clearly.

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 paperback sales debate and an urban tree planting initiative.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Publishing analyst Wren Castillo ties the slow decline in paperback sales to the growing popularity of audiobooks, a trend she expects to continue over the next several years.

Text 2

Physical book clubs and in-store events appear to have helped: paperback novel sales rose seven percent in 2027, a retail report found, with booksellers crediting renewed interest in both.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Canopy growth models built into a city forestry report suggest that a proposed street tree planting initiative could lower summer temperatures in target neighborhoods by roughly four degrees.

Text 2

An independent urban ecologist who reviewed those canopy models found they assumed the near-perfect survival rates seen in the city's best-maintained parks, rates that street trees in busy, high-traffic areas rarely reach.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse the divergent and obstinate passages from earlier vocabulary work, this time asking what the passage means as a whole rather than what one word means.

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

The two economists reached strikingly divergent conclusions despite analyzing the exact same data set, with one predicting a mild recession and the other forecasting steady growth through the next fiscal year.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

Despite mounting evidence against his theory, the scientist remained obstinate, refusing to revise a single conclusion even after three independent labs reported results that contradicted his original findings.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the scientist's response to the new evidence?

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

Twenty-one online programs took part in a study testing whether text message reminders help students complete more course modules than email reminders alone. Students were paired by course difficulty, enrollment date, and prior completion rate. Reminder method was the sole condition that shifted from one paired student to the next.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers' proposal?

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

Toll receipts from a desert caravan route show a far wider variety of goods than earlier accounts described, a historian argues, adding that scholars have overstated the importance of the route's spice trade relative to everything else it carried.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the historian'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

A smart meter app that showed households real-time usage data cut water consumption sixteen percent more than a monthly paper bill did, despite identical water rates for both groups. This suggests to a utility company with a limited outreach budget that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

Small storage baskets appeared in nearly every household of an ancient farming settlement, yet a single large stone structure at the settlement's center held grain stores far exceeding what any one household could consume. This pattern points to the conclusion that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

out of 18 correct

Question Distribution by Skill

How This Set Is Built

Set 10 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 closes out the first ten SAT Vocab episodes by pairing malleable and obstinate, two words that sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum of openness to change. The two Central Ideas questions close the vocabulary loop by reusing divergent and obstinate from earlier in the set, 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 ascertain and nebulous 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 pushes back on 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, module completion, that the researchers proposed. 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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