Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 2

A political debate, a museum renovation, and a sunken cargo ship each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.2. 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 2 Full Domain Practice From Ep.2 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.2 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.2 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 2 pulls its passages from a mix of civic and academic scenarios: a political debate over unemployment data, a tax code guidebook, a hospital tracking recovery times, a college facing declining enrollment, a defense attorney's procedural argument, a safety inspection, and a handful of research settings involving a museum renovation, a wheat field study, e-book sales, and a downtown bike lane proposal. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.2 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Several Ep.2 words cluster around the idea of making an argument, refute, postulate, assert, and contend all describe different ways of stating or challenging a claim. The Digital SAT tests this cluster often, since distinguishing "confidently stating" from "arguing against" from "disproving" is exactly the kind of precision the exam rewards.

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 televised debate to a hospital's recovery-time tracking.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

During the debate, the challenger attempted to refute the incumbent's claim that unemployment had fallen citywide, presenting district-level data that showed several neighborhoods still losing jobs.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

Rather than simplify the tax code's language, the new guidebook aims to elucidate its most confusing sections through annotated examples drawn from real filings.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

Instead of relying on anecdotal reports from patients, the clinic began collecting empirical data from wearable sensors to track recovery times after surgery.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

With the ship's logbook lost at sea, historians could only offer conjecture about why the crew abandoned the vessel so suddenly.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

After two consecutive years of declining enrollment, the small liberal arts college found itself in a precarious financial position, with administrators warning that a third year could force campus closures.

As used in the text, "precarious" 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 postulate, contend, and enumerate.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

Long before satellite imagery existed, geologists had to ______ that the continents were once joined together, based only on matching fossil patterns and coastline shapes.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

Defense attorneys ______ that the search warrant had been issued improperly, arguing the case should be dismissed on procedural grounds alone.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

In her opening remarks, the inspector ______ each safety violation found during the walkthrough, numbering them one through twelve for the record.

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 museum renovation and a wheat field study.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

A city museum's renovation plan initially promised to preserve every historic facade along the building's original street-facing wall. Preservationists praised the announcement as a rare commitment to architectural continuity downtown. Midway through construction, however, engineers discovered structural decay severe enough to require replacing two of the four facades with modern replicas. This discovery forced planners to revise their original promise significantly.

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

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

Wheat yield depends on many factors, but agricultural researchers wanted to isolate two: nitrogen fertilizer and irrigation timing. They monitored two test plots, one receiving extra nitrogen and one receiving adjusted irrigation schedules, over a full growing season. The extra-nitrogen plot yielded only marginally more grain than the irrigation-adjusted plot, a difference within normal seasonal variation. In stalk strength, however, the irrigation-adjusted plot showed substantially fewer instances of lodging, where stalks bend or break before harvest. The study's design, which isolated each variable separately, made this distinction clear.

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 an e-book sales debate and a downtown bike lane proposal.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Publishing analyst Owen Kessler points to shrinking print runs at major publishers as proof that e-books will overtake print entirely within five years, calling the shift irreversible.

Text 2

Independent bookstores saw print sales climb six percent in 2027, based on survey data collected that year, and several owners credited a renewed customer appetite for physical browsing.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

City planners project that a new downtown bike lane network would shorten car commute times for roughly 15,000 residents, a figure built from mode-shift models estimating how many drivers would switch to biking.

Text 2

Those mode-shift figures did not hold up under review, according to an independent transportation analyst, who found the models relied on a rate of drivers switching to bikes well above anything recorded in a comparable city.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse the assert and delineate 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

In its annual report, the auditing firm asserts that the company's revenue figures accurately reflect its financial position, despite earlier concerns raised by two former employees about irregular bookkeeping practices.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

After months of overlapping responsibilities caused confusion between the two departments, the new operations manual carefully delineates which team handles customer complaints and which team handles billing disputes, reducing the number of misrouted requests within the first month.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the outcome of the new manual?

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

Researchers studying study habits suspected that breaking study time into short, spaced sessions would help students remember more a week later than cramming it into one long session, even with total study time held constant. They tested the idea using week-later quiz scores across fifteen classrooms. Students, paired by subject material and baseline quiz performance, differed from each other only in how they divided their study time.

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

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

New analysis of toll records from a regional canal indicates the waterway carried far more freight than earlier accounts assumed, a historian argues, adding that the railroad which later replaced it has drawn scholarly attention away from the canal's own economic role.

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

When schools compared one-on-one tutoring against group tutoring using identical material, students receiving one-on-one instruction improved their test scores twenty percent more. For a school with a limited tutoring budget, this comparison suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

Marine archaeologists surveying a sunken cargo ship found everyday trade goods scattered across the main hold, but a single reinforced compartment near the stern contained only sealed ceramic jars packed in protective straw. 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 2 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 on Ep.2's cluster of argument-related verbs, refute, postulate, assert, and contend, to test how precisely you can tell apart different ways of stating or challenging a claim. The two Central Ideas questions close the vocabulary loop by reusing assert and delineate 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 refute and conjecture 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, week-later quiz scores, 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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