Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 13

A glacier monitoring expedition, an ostentatious corporate headquarters, and an ancient dyeing workshop each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.13. 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 13 Full Domain Practice From Ep.13 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.13 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.13 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 13 pulls its passages from a mix of civic and workplace scenarios: a shrinking school budget, a skeptical professor, an angry group of residents, an extravagant company headquarters, an exhausted bookkeeper, and a handful of settings involving a glacier monitoring expedition, employee review formats, board game sales, and a citywide composting program. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.13 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Nearly every word in Ep.13 leans negative, curtail, dubious, extraneous, indignant, ostentatious, tedious, and verbose all describe some kind of flaw or excess. Only prolific stands out as clearly positive, which makes it a useful anchor when a Words in Context question in this set feels ambiguous.

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 shrinking school budget to an exhausted bookkeeper.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

Facing a shrinking budget, the school board voted to curtail the after-school music program, cutting it from five days a week to two.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

The professor remained dubious about the study's conclusions, noting that the sample size of only fourteen participants was far too small to support such a broad claim.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

Residents grew indignant after the city council approved the parking garage without holding a single public hearing, despite promises made two years earlier.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

Critics called the new headquarters ostentatious, pointing to the gold-plated elevator doors and marble lobby as unnecessary displays of wealth for a company that had just laid off two hundred workers.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

Sorting through three decades of unlabeled receipts proved to be a tedious task for the new bookkeeper, who spent nearly two full weeks on the project alone.

As used in the text, "tedious" 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 extraneous, rescind, and verbose.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

The editor cut every ______ detail from the report, leaving only the facts directly relevant to the case under review.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

After public backlash over the new attendance policy, the university ______ it just three days after the announcement, reverting to the previous rules.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

The professor's ______ feedback often buried a single useful suggestion under three paragraphs of commentary that students struggled to parse.

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 glacier monitoring expedition and an employee review study.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

Five years of dramatic ice loss at a glacier study site anchor a new monitoring documentary, most of which attributes that loss entirely to regional temperature increases. The film waits until its closing segment to mention that the glacier's unusual dark surface dust, tracked separately by the research team, likely accelerated melting beyond what temperature alone would explain. This late detail makes temperature's exact share of the loss harder to establish than the film first implied.

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

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

Over the same year, two departments took different approaches to performance reviews, one relying on quarterly written reviews and the other on monthly check-in conversations, so that human resources researchers could compare employee goal completion. The quarterly-review department completed only slightly fewer goals than the monthly check-in department, too slight to draw conclusions from. In reported clarity about expectations, however, the monthly check-in department scored substantially higher. Since only the review format changed between departments, the study revealed 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 board game sales debate and a citywide composting program.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Toy industry analyst Marcus Whitfield expects board game sales to keep shrinking as mobile gaming apps eat further into the category.

Text 2

Family game nights and in-person tournaments kept demand alive: board game sales climbed eleven percent in 2027, a hobby retail report showed, according to several store owners surveyed.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Household participation projections in a city sanitation report suggest that a citywide composting program could reduce landfill waste by roughly thirty percent.

Text 2

An independent waste management consultant who examined those participation projections found they applied the turnout rate from the city's single most engaged pilot neighborhood to every neighborhood, despite weaker engagement seen elsewhere.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse the mercurial and prolific 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 director's mercurial temperament made it difficult for the cast to know whether a scene had gone well or badly, since his reaction could shift from enthusiastic praise to sharp criticism within the same rehearsal.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

Despite living only into her thirties, the poet was remarkably prolific, publishing four full collections and dozens of individual poems in literary journals before her death.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the poet's output?

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

Email marketing researchers wanted to know whether question-phrased subject lines produce higher open rates than statement-phrased ones, apart from send time or recipient list. They compared open rates from paired campaigns across twenty companies matched for send time, recipient list, and prior open rate. Every other condition stayed constant except subject line phrasing.

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

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

A coastal fishing village exported preserved fish to a far wider network of inland markets than earlier accounts suggested, a historian argues after examining its tax ledgers, adding that scholars have focused too narrowly on the village's local fish market.

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

Short walking breaks between study sessions helped students retain nineteen percent more material on a later quiz than seated breaks did, even with identical total study time for both groups. A teacher designing study guides could reasonably conclude from this that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

Undyed thread appeared in nearly every household of an ancient textile settlement, according to excavation records, while a single structure near the settlement's stream held large basins stained with multiple colors of dye alongside stacks of raw dye plants. This imbalance suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

out of 18 correct

Question Distribution by Skill

How This Set Is Built

Set 13 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 leans heavily negative in tone, with prolific standing as the only clearly positive word against seven others describing some kind of flaw or excess, which makes tracking a passage's emotional charge especially useful for this set. The two Central Ideas questions close the vocabulary loop by reusing mercurial and prolific 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 dubious and ostentatious 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, email open rates, 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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