Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 16

A plant safety tribunal, a stranded flight's meal vouchers, and a farming cooperative's irrigation trial each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.16. 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 16 Full Domain Practice From Ep.16 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.16 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.16 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 16 pulls its passages from a mix of institutional and everyday scenarios: a plant collapse tribunal, a manager's mismatched expense reports, a museum visitor's suspicious behavior, a corroding pipeline, and a stranded flight's meal vouchers, along with a handful of settings involving a four-day workweek audit, a hospital staffing report, a downtown pedestrian mall, and a reservoir nesting site study. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.16 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Several Ep.16 words carry a clear emotional charge: pacify leans positive, describing calm restored, while belligerent, duplicity, and ostracize lean sharply negative, describing conflict, deception, and exclusion. Acquiesce and tacit stay closer to neutral, describing quiet agreement rather than something 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 safety tribunal to a corroding pipeline.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

After months of testimony, the tribunal declared the plant's former safety director culpable for the collapse, noting that internal memos showed he had ignored three separate structural warnings.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

Employees discovered the manager's duplicity only after comparing two sets of expense reports, one submitted to headquarters and one kept privately, that told two very different stories about the same budget.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

Museum guards grew suspicious of the visitor's furtive movements near the display case, the quick glances toward the exit and the way he kept one hand hidden inside his coat.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

The engineer warned that corrosion inside the pipeline was insidious, spreading undetected beneath a layer of paint for years before a single weak joint finally gave way.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

By the third week of the heat wave, the entire crew had grown lethargic, moving through their shifts at half speed and skipping tasks that once took only minutes.

As used in the text, "lethargic" 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 acquiesce, belligerent, and ostracize.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

After the board rejected her first two proposals, the architect finally ______ to their request for a smaller budget, though she warned the change would limit what the design could accomplish.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

The referee ejected the coach for his ______ conduct toward the officiating crew, a confrontation that began over a single disputed call and escalated within seconds.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

Once word spread that she had reported the coach's misconduct, several teammates began to ______ her, leaving her out of team chats and sitting apart from her at practice.

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 workplace wellness newsletter and a community garden comparison.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

A workplace wellness newsletter highlighted a new office program after employees who joined reported eating more vegetables and sleeping better within two months. The newsletter went on to note that the nine participants, out of roughly one hundred fifty employees in the office, had already volunteered for the program after separately expressing interest in changing their diets.

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

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

Do community gardens reduce grocery spending more when plots are assigned by lottery or by written application? A city agriculture office tracked household grocery receipts across two neighborhoods for one growing season, one using lottery assignment and the other using a written application process, with both neighborhoods given identical plot sizes and planting schedules. Households in the lottery neighborhood reported only a modest decrease in average grocery spending. Households in the application neighborhood, matched for similar income levels, reported a far steeper decline.

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 four-day workweek audit and a hospital staffing report.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A workplace consultant, reviewing productivity logs from a mid-size accounting firm, concluded that employees who switched to a four-day workweek completed the same volume of client work as before, and recommended the schedule for firms of similar size.

Text 2

A separate audit of the same accounting firm found that during the trial period, the firm quietly brought on two temporary contractors to help clear overflow client work, a detail not reflected in the productivity logs the consultant reviewed.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A regional health department report attributes a recent decline in emergency room wait times to a new triage software system installed at three hospitals last year.

Text 2

Hospital staffing records from the same three hospitals show that all three also hired additional overnight nurses in the months surrounding the software rollout, a staffing change the health department's report does not mention.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse pacify and tacit from Vocab Ep.16, this time asking what the passage means as a whole rather than what one word means.

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

Airline representatives moved to pacify the stranded passengers by distributing meal vouchers and hotel rooms within the first hour of the delay, a response that several passengers later said kept a frustrating night from turning into a chaotic one.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

Though the two research labs never signed a formal agreement, a tacit understanding had developed over years of shared conferences: neither would publish overlapping findings without first notifying the other.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the nature of the labs' arrangement?

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 school district wants to know whether later start times improve student attendance. Researchers propose comparing attendance rates at high schools that delayed their start time by one hour against demographically similar high schools that kept their original schedule, over the same semester.

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

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

An urban planner argues that a downtown pedestrian mall installed two years ago has increased foot traffic to nearby small businesses, rather than simply relocating shoppers who would have visited anyway.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the planner'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 farming cooperative compared two irrigation methods across neighboring plots with the same soil type and crop variety. Plots using drip irrigation produced fifteen percent higher yields than plots using overhead sprinklers, even though both groups received the same total volume of water over the growing season. Based on this finding, a cooperative with a limited water budget could reasonably conclude that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

A field biologist tracking nest sites along a reservoir noticed that ordinary nests were scattered loosely across the shoreline, while a cluster of unusually large, reinforced nests appeared only on a narrow rock outcropping that stayed dry even during the highest spring floods. This pattern suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

out of 18 correct

Question Distribution by Skill

How This Set Is Built

Set 16 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.16's cluster of words describing conflict and deception, belligerent and duplicity lean negative while pacify leans clearly positive, testing how well you track a passage's charge as much as its literal meaning. The two Central Ideas questions close the vocabulary loop by reusing pacify and tacit, 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 furtive and insidious 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, attendance rate, 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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