Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 21

A decades-old vineyard feud, a glassblowing video that went viral, and a blacksmith's quenching experiment each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.21. 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 21 Full Domain Practice From Ep.21 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.21 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.21 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 21 pulls its passages from a mix of everyday and craft-focused scenarios: a calligraphy teacher's exacting standards, a decades-old vineyard property dispute, an overselling hot air balloon pilot, an opera director stung by one bad review, and a perfume ad dismissed as empty, along with a handful of settings involving a falconer's caution, a coffee roastery's price increase, a blacksmith's apprentice, a viral glassblowing video, and a wildlife center's donation surge. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.21 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Ep.21's words split across the emotional spectrum: discreet and trenchant lean positive, describing tact and sharp precision, while abhor, enmity, grandiose, nettle, and vacuous lean negative, describing hatred, hostility, overblown claims, irritation, and emptiness. Immutable, ostensible, and pique stay closer to neutral, describing permanence, surface appearance, and a sudden spike of interest 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 a calligraphy classroom to a perfume advertisement.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

The calligraphy teacher made no secret that she abhorred the sight of a rushed signature, calling it disrespectful to a craft that rewarded patience above all else.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

Decades of enmity between the two vineyard-owning families started over a disputed property line and had never fully healed, even after both original owners had passed away.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

The balloon pilot's grandiose promises of an unforgettable sunrise flight over the canyon fell flat once passengers realized the route barely left the launch field.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

A single dismissive line in the newspaper review nettled the opera director for weeks, far longer than the mostly positive coverage that surrounded it.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

Critics dismissed the new perfume's advertising copy as vacuous, all evocative adjectives about moonlit gardens and no actual description of what the scent smelled like.

As used in the text, "vacuous" 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 discreet, ostensible, and pique.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

The falconer kept her injured bird's location deliberately ______, worried that public attention would stress the animal during its recovery.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

The roastery's ______ reason for raising prices was rising bean costs, though longtime customers suspected the new espresso machine had something to do with it too.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

The old anvil's strange, uneven hammer marks ______ the apprentice's curiosity enough that she spent her lunch break trying to figure out who had used it before.

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 hot air balloon essay and a vineyard irrigation test.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

A travel writer's essay opens by lamenting how few hot air balloon operators still schedule dawn flights, when winds are calmest and views clearest, before its final paragraphs turn to profile the handful of pilots who still insist on early launches despite the inconvenience to sleepy customers.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the essay's opening and its final paragraphs?

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

A vineyard experimented with two irrigation timings for the same grape variety this season, watering at dawn for one block and at dusk for another. The dawn-watered block yielded grapes with only marginally higher sugar content than the dusk-watered block, a negligible difference for winemaking purposes. Vine disease rates painted a different picture: the dawn-watered block showed far fewer signs of fungal growth.

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 viral glassblowing video and a wildlife center's donor newsletter.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

According to a glassblowing studio owner, a video of a difficult technique going viral online alone explains her shop's tripled sales this year.

Text 2

The studio's own sales records show prices were also cut by twenty percent the same week the video was posted, ahead of a planned renovation, a detail the owner's public statements do not mention.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A wildlife rehabilitation center's donor newsletter gives credit for a recent rise in falconry program donations to a series of educational open-house events held throughout the year.

Text 2

A single donor also pledged to match any gift made during three of those same months, the center's financial records show, a detail the newsletter leaves out.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse immutable and trenchant from Vocab Ep.21, this time asking what the passage means as a whole rather than what one word means.

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

The retired judge often told new clerks that certain principles of contract law were immutable, unlikely to shift no matter how creatively opposing counsel tried to reinterpret them.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

Though only three paragraphs long, the critic's trenchant review dismantled the novel's central argument so precisely that the author reportedly rewrote the book's opening chapter in response.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the nature of the critic's review?

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 coffee roastery's head roaster is convinced that a slower, lower-temperature roast profile preserves more of a bean's original fruit notes than a faster, higher-temperature profile.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the head roaster's conviction?

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

A climbing gym's safety director maintains that requiring a partner check before every climb has reduced fall-related injuries more than posting safety reminders alone.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the director's claim?

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

Oil-quenched blades developed noticeably fewer hairline cracks than water-quenched blades of the same type in a blacksmith's comparison test, even though both blade types reached identical final hardness levels. For a blacksmith focused on blade durability, this result supports the conclusion that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

An auction house's records show that paintings appraised by one senior appraiser sell for an average of twenty percent above their pre-sale estimate, while paintings appraised by other staff members sell close to their estimated value. A house director reviewing the gap might reasonably infer that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

out of 18 correct

Question Distribution by Skill

How This Set Is Built

Set 21 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.21's cluster of words describing hostility and impressions, enmity and grandiose lean negative while discreet and trenchant 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 immutable and trenchant, 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 grandiose and vacuous 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, taste panel ratings, that the head roaster's conviction depends on. 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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