Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 22

A cardiac surgeon's calm response to crisis, an automaker CEO's recall press conference, and a city planning report's disputed ridership assumption each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.22. 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 22 Full Domain Practice From Ep.22 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.22 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.22 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 22 pulls its passages from a mix of professional and everyday scenarios: a cardiac surgeon's composure under pressure, an automaker CEO's public apology, a lawmaker's ill-timed joke at a budget hearing, and a courtroom's tense silence before a verdict, along with a handful of settings involving a photography exhibit, a sleep deprivation study, a remote-work office space debate, a proposed light-rail line, a shuttered textile mill, and a struggling shipping industry. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.22 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Most of Ep.22's words carry a negative charge: bereft, doldrums, facetious, malaise, obdurate, and sanctimonious all describe some form of loss, stagnation, or misplaced attitude, while adroit and contrite lean clearly positive, describing skill and genuine remorse. Palpable and truncate stay closer to neutral, describing intensity and length 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

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

A veteran cardiac surgeon is known among residents less for speed than for how calmly she responds when a procedure stops going as planned. Colleagues describe her as unusually adroit under pressure, capable of adjusting a plan mid-operation without losing precision or composure.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

After the recall of nearly two million vehicles, the automaker's chief executive appeared before reporters and offered a fully contrite statement, accepting personal responsibility for the oversight rather than blaming suppliers or regulators, and outlining a revised inspection process in specific detail.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

During a tense budget hearing, a committee member responded to a serious question about overspending with a facetious remark comparing the deficit to a rounding error, drawing scattered laughter but visibly frustrating colleagues who had hoped for a direct answer.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

As the jury filed back into the courtroom after nine hours of deliberation, the silence in the gallery became palpable, so noticeable that observers later said they could hear individual breaths across the room while the verdict was read.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

Facing a strict word limit for the front-page story, the editor had to truncate the original draft by nearly half, cutting background material while keeping the central timeline of events fully intact.

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

Words in Context - Complete the Text

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

Even after unemployment figures returned to pre-recession levels, consumer confidence surveys continued to show a lingering ______, with respondents citing a vague sense that the recovery felt incomplete despite the improved statistics.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

Despite three separate appeals from the city council, the property owner remained ______, refusing to repair the building's facade even after receiving a formal citation and a court-ordered deadline.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

Critics found the senator's lecture on fiscal responsibility ______, since the same senator had voted for the very spending bill he now claimed to oppose.

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

Text Structure and Purpose

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

A new exhibit on early photography opens with a wall of daguerreotypes praised by critics for their technical clarity. The curator's notes emphasize how quickly the medium advanced within a single decade. Only in the exhibit's final room does the text acknowledge a significant limitation: the earliest processes required subjects to remain motionless for several minutes, which shaped who could be photographed and how. This closing acknowledgment complicates the otherwise celebratory framing established at the entrance.

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

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

Sleep-deprived participants and well-rested participants worked through an identical battery of tasks in a study designed to compare which cognitive skill suffers more from lost sleep. On memory tasks, the sleep-deprived group scored only marginally lower, a gap too small to be meaningful. On reaction-time tasks, however, the same group lagged substantially, missing cues nearly twice as often as their well-rested counterparts.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Cross-Text Connections

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

Economist Renata Ford argues that remote work has permanently reduced demand for downtown office space, predicting that vacancy rates in major cities will remain elevated for at least a decade.

Text 2

Corporate leasing requests for downtown office space actually climbed eleven percent in 2026, according to a survey of leasing agents, with several firms pointing to a renewed preference for in-person collaboration.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A city planning report concludes that a proposed light-rail line would reduce commute times for roughly 40,000 residents, based on projected ridership models.

Text 2

An independent transit analyst reviewing the same models found that they assumed near-total adoption of the new line by current bus riders, an assumption the analyst called optimistic given ridership patterns on comparable projects elsewhere.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

When the region's largest textile mill closed after ninety years of continuous operation, nearly a third of the town's working adults lost their only source of income within a single week. Families who had built their lives around the mill's steady paychecks were left bereft, with no comparable employer within a hundred miles.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

Container shipping rates fell for eleven consecutive months, and freight volume through the port stayed flat even as global trade overall expanded. Analysts describe the industry as stuck in the doldrums, waiting for a shift in demand that has yet to arrive.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the shipping industry's situation?

Command of Evidence

Question 15 of 18 Information and Ideas

A research team studying urban tree cover proposed that neighborhoods with denser tree canopy experience measurably lower summer surface temperatures than neighborhoods with sparse canopy, even when building density and building materials are held constant. To test this, they compared thermal imaging data from paired neighborhoods across twelve cities, chosen specifically because each pair shared similar zoning, similar average building height, and similar pavement coverage, differing mainly in the percentage of ground covered by tree canopy.

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

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

A historian points to circulation ledgers showing that a controversial 1920s editorial reached readers well beyond the newspaper's home city, complicating the long-held scholarly view that treated the piece as a minor, local-only statement with little influence on the era's politics.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the historian's argument?

Inferences

Question 17 of 18 Information and Ideas

Fields planted with cover crops retained twenty percent more topsoil during heavy rainfall than fields left bare between growing seasons, according to a study comparing the two farming methods. This finding gives farmers in regions prone to erosion good reason to believe that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

A survey of shipwreck cargo manifests along an ancient trade route found that everyday goods, pottery, tools, and cloth, appeared on nearly every wreck's manifest, but one wreck's manifest recorded an unusually large shipment of a single luxury good, far exceeding what any other wreck along the route carried. 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 22 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 hardest into the two types that take the most work to practice well: Cross-Text Connections, where you compare two short passages instead of one, and Command of Evidence, where you match a claim to the finding that actually proves it rather than one that just sounds related. The two Central Ideas questions close the vocabulary loop by reusing bereft and doldrums, 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 facetious and sanctimonious 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, surface temperature, that the researchers proposed comparing. 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.

CramBookNotes.com - Free study guides for students and educators - Back to Home