Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 23

A search-and-rescue trainer's warning, a fraudulent antique clock scheme, and a cracking sound beneath a skating rink each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.23. 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 23 Full Domain Practice From Ep.23 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.23 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.23 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 23 pulls its passages from a mix of professional and everyday scenarios: a search-and-rescue trainer's caution, a jazz bandleader's frustration, a furious cable-repair customer, a fraudulent antique clock scheme, and a pungent cheese cellar, along with a handful of settings involving a champion figure skater's interview, a theater lighting pitch, a debate judge's notes, a meadery's fermentation test, and an undersea cable repair claim. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.23 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Most of Ep.23's words carry a negative charge: indolent, livid, nefarious, panacea, repugnant, and waver all describe some form of laziness, anger, wrongdoing, false promise, disgust, or hesitation, while demure leans clearly positive, describing modest reserve. Cognizant, harbinger, and salient stay closer to neutral, describing awareness, an early sign, and prominence 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 search-and-rescue trainer's caution to a pungent cheese cellar.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

The search-and-rescue trainer made sure every new handler was fully cognizant of how quickly a dog's scent trail could be disrupted by wind, since ignoring that risk had cost previous teams valuable search time.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

The bandleader grew frustrated with the drummer's indolent approach to rehearsals, showing up late and running through the setlist half-heartedly while the rest of the quartet worked out new arrangements.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

The cable repair company's client was livid after learning that a scheduling error had left an entire coastal town without internet service for three extra days beyond the promised repair window.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

Investigators eventually uncovered the antique dealer's nefarious scheme: selling modern reproductions disguised as centuries-old clocks to collectors who had no way of verifying the mechanisms inside.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

Visitors touring the cheese aging cellar for the first time often found the smell repugnant, though the cheesemaker insisted the pungent odor was a reliable sign the wheels were developing properly.

As used in the text, "repugnant" 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 demure, panacea, and salient.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

Despite winning the national championship, the young skater gave a surprisingly ______ interview, deflecting praise toward her coach and choreographer rather than discussing her own performance.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

The lighting company's sales representative described the new programmable rig as a ______ for every staging problem a theater might face, though veteran designers doubted any single system could really do that much.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

The debate judge's notes praised one particularly ______ point in the closing rebuttal, a single statistic that undercut the opposing team's entire argument in one line.

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 natural history diorama and a meadery's fermentation test.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

A century-old diorama at a natural history museum shows a pack of wolves posed mid-hunt, a scene museum guides have long described as a faithful snapshot of natural behavior. Only in a newly added placard does the museum acknowledge that the taxidermist arranged the animals for dramatic effect rather than to depict any behavior actually observed in the wild.

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

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

A meadery compared two fermentation vessels for the same batch of honey wine, aging half in oak barrels and half in stainless steel tanks. Tasters rated the oak-aged mead only slightly more complex in flavor, a gap too narrow to be decisive. In clarity, however, the stainless-steel batch came out far more consistent, with noticeably less sediment.

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 figure skating scoring change and an undersea cable repair claim.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A skating federation official attributes a recent rise in triple-axel attempts among junior skaters to a scoring change that rewards jump difficulty more heavily than previous seasons.

Text 2

Coaching survey data from the same junior circuit shows that ice time at practice rinks also expanded by nearly thirty percent over the same two seasons, giving skaters far more opportunity to drill difficult jumps.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A telecom industry report credits faster average repair times for damaged undersea cables to a new fleet of specialized repair ships introduced last year.

Text 2

Weather records for the same period show unusually calm ocean conditions across the repair zones, calmer seas that repair crews say made every stage of the process faster regardless of which ship was used.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse harbinger and waver from Vocab Ep.23, this time asking what the passage means as a whole rather than what one word means.

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

The faint cracking sound beneath the ice, barely audible over the music, proved to be a harbinger of the rink's structural problems, which forced the facility to close for repairs less than a week later.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

Under repeated cross-examination about the timeline, the witness began to waver, softening details she had stated with total confidence just an hour earlier.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the witness's testimony during cross-examination?

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 search-and-rescue coordinator believes dogs trained with scent-discrimination drills locate missing hikers faster than dogs trained with open-area search drills alone.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the coordinator's belief?

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

A theater technical director argues that switching to LED stage lighting has reduced the venue's cooling costs rather than simply lowering its electricity bill.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the director'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 creamery first began aging a new cheese variety, staff assumed a consistently cool aging room would produce the firmest rind. After testing showed wheels stored at fluctuating temperatures actually developed firmer, more consistent rinds than wheels kept at a constant cool temperature, the creamery had to reconsider its approach. This pattern suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

Marine surveyors recommend monitoring a dozen different indicator species to track a reef's overall health, yet field data from one recovering reef showed that changes in just two species, a coral type and a grazing fish, closely tracked every major shift in the reef's condition. 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 23 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.23's cluster of words describing awareness and wrongdoing, nefarious and repugnant lean negative while demure 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 harbinger and waver, 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 nefarious and repugnant 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, search speed, that the coordinator's belief 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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