Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 17

A drawn-out estate dispute, a gallery curator's cold reception, and a library testing extended weekday hours each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.17. 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 17 Full Domain Practice From Ep.17 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.17 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.17 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 17 pulls its passages from a mix of everyday and professional scenarios: a drawn-out estate dispute, a factory's complacent quality control team, a fastidious head chef, a haughty gallery curator, and a rushed elevator inspection, along with a handful of settings involving a plagiarism case, a city traffic report, a hospital paperwork fix, coastal insurance premiums, and a study on library hours. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.17 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Several Ep.17 words carry a clear emotional charge: emulate, gregarious, and unassuming lean positive, describing admiration, sociability, and modesty, while acrimony, complacent, haughty, perfunctory, and somber lean negative, describing hostility, carelessness, arrogance, and gloom. Fastidious stays closer to neutral, describing precision 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 an estate dispute to a rushed elevator inspection.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

The estate dispute between the siblings dragged on for years, marked by an acrimony so persistent that even routine phone calls between them required a lawyer present.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

After a decade without a single product recall, the factory's quality control team grew complacent, skipping inspection steps that had once been mandatory for every batch.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

The head chef was famously fastidious about plate presentation, sending back any dish where the garnish sat even a few millimeters off center.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

Visitors often found the gallery's new curator haughty, dismissing questions about the exhibit's meaning with a brief, condescending glance before walking away.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

The technician's perfunctory inspection lasted less than two minutes, a checklist glanced at rather than followed, before he declared the elevator safe to use.

As used in the text, "perfunctory" 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 blatant, gregarious, and unassuming.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

The professor failed the paper immediately upon noticing several paragraphs lifted word for word from a published article, calling the plagiarism too ______ to ignore.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

Even during her first week, the new sales associate's ______ personality had her chatting easily with customers and coworkers alike, as if she had worked there for years.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

Despite running a company now worth hundreds of millions, the founder remained remarkably ______ in interviews, crediting her team rather than herself for the company's success.

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 city traffic report and a hospital paperwork fix.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

Downtown traffic congestion has dropped fifteen percent since a new light rail line opened two years ago, a connection that dominates most of a city planning report's findings. Buried in an appendix, the report notes that a major highway ramp near downtown was also closed for unrelated repairs during eighteen of those twenty-four months.

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

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

A hospital tried two different fixes for paperwork errors over the same quarter, a redesigned patient intake form in one department and extra staff retraining sessions in another. The redesigned-form department cut errors by a wide margin, while the retrained department saw almost no measurable change.

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 coastal insurance premiums and grocery store checkout times.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

New flood-resistant building codes deserve much of the credit for a recent decline in coastal home insurance premiums, according to insurance industry analyst Priya Chandra.

Text 2

State insurance filings from the same coastal region show that several major insurers also reduced coverage limits during the same period, a change not mentioned in analyst reports crediting the building codes.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Self-checkout kiosks alone explain shorter checkout times at several grocery chains this year, according to a retail trade report.

Text 2

The same grocery chains also added extra cashiers during peak hours that same period, according to internal staffing logs the retail trade report never references.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse emulate and somber from Vocab Ep.17, this time asking what the passage means as a whole rather than what one word means.

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

Young chefs at the restaurant often tried to emulate the head chef's exacting standards, timing their knife cuts and plating to match hers down to the smallest detail.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

The town hall meeting took on a somber tone once officials announced the century-old bridge would be demolished rather than repaired, with several longtime residents leaving before the meeting ended.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the mood of the meeting after the announcement?

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

Visitor traffic at library branches that extended weekday hours by two hours was compared against traffic at similar branches that kept their original hours, over the same six-month period, to see whether the longer hours actually drew more visitors.

Which finding, if true, would most directly show that the longer hours increased visitor traffic?

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

Grocery spending at nearby small businesses has increased since a new weekend farmers market began, a change a city council member argues reflects genuinely new spending rather than shoppers who would have visited those businesses anyway.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the council member'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 furniture maker dried matching pieces using two different kiln methods before assembly, pieces dried slowly warped twenty percent less over six months than pieces dried quickly, even though both methods reduced moisture to the same final level before assembly began. For a furniture maker prioritizing long-term durability, this result points toward the conclusion that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

Master gardeners recommend up to a dozen different native plant species for attracting pollinators to a home garden, yet a citywide survey found that gardens containing just two particular native species, wild bergamot and purple coneflower, accounted for most of the native bee sightings reported by garden owners. This finding suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

out of 18 correct

Question Distribution by Skill

How This Set Is Built

Set 17 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.17's cluster of words describing social conduct and self-regard, haughty and complacent lean negative while gregarious and unassuming lean 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 emulate and somber, 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 fastidious and perfunctory 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, visitor traffic, that the librarians proposed studying. 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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