Digital SAT Passage Practice - Set 35

An epidemiologist's caution about limited evidence, a criminal defense investigator's overlooked detail, and a software QA team's overturned assumption about bug patterns each hide one of the ten words from SAT Vocab Ep.35. 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 35 Full Domain Practice From Ep.35 Words

High School Grades 10-12 18 Questions Digital SAT Format

◀ Review Vocab Ep.35 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.35 so the vocabulary stays familiar while the question types rotate through the full range you will actually see on test day.

Set 35 continues the argument-and-analysis vocabulary theme with passages from a mix of research and investigative scenarios: an epidemiologist's caution about limited evidence, a survey methodologist's discredited data, a food safety inspector's overconfident assumption, a criminal defense witness's evasive answers, and a genealogy researcher's indirect proof, along with a handful of settings involving a market research analyst, a clinical psychologist, a software QA tester, an agricultural extension agent, and a crop yield researcher. None of these scenarios repeat a real-world case; they were written specifically to give each of the ten Ep.35 words a natural, test-realistic sentence to live in.

Ep.35's words split into a positive and negative cluster: consensus, objective, and rigorous lean positive, describing agreement, impartiality, and thoroughness, while anecdotal, discredit, presumptuous, and prevaricate lean negative, describing weak evidence, doubt, overconfidence, and evasiveness. Circumstantial, countenance, and preponderance stay neutral, naming tools or qualities of evidence without judging them as 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 epidemiologist's research team to a genealogy researcher's family history project.

Question 1 of 18 Craft and Structure

The epidemiologist reminded her team that three patients reporting similar symptoms was still only anecdotal evidence, nowhere near enough to confirm a pattern without a formal study.

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

Question 2 of 18 Craft and Structure

A single leaked memo showing biased question wording was enough to discredit the entire survey, forcing the research firm to scrap months of data collection.

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

Question 3 of 18 Craft and Structure

The new inspector's presumptuous assumption that every kitchen violation meant deliberate negligence cost her the trust of restaurant owners who were simply unaware of the updated code.

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

Question 4 of 18 Craft and Structure

When asked directly whether he had been at the warehouse that night, the witness began to prevaricate, giving vague, shifting answers instead of a clear yes or no.

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

Question 5 of 18 Craft and Structure

Without a birth certificate, the genealogy researcher had only circumstantial evidence, old letters and a family Bible inscription, to support the claim that the two families were related.

As used in the text, "circumstantial" 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 consensus, objective, and rigorous.

Question 6 of 18 Craft and Structure

After three rounds of separate focus groups, the market research analyst finally reached a clear ______ that customers preferred the redesigned packaging over the original.

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

Question 7 of 18 Craft and Structure

The clinical psychologist relied on a standardized ______ scoring rubric rather than her personal impressions when evaluating each patient's assessment results.

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

Question 8 of 18 Craft and Structure

The QA team's ______ testing protocol required every new feature to pass over two hundred automated checks before it could be approved for release.

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 an agricultural extension agent's yield claim and a crop yield researcher's irrigation comparison.

Question 9 of 18 Craft and Structure

An agricultural extension agent's newsletter credits a single new fertilizer blend for a dramatic rise in a local farm's corn yield. A footnote added after a neighboring farmer's question notes that the farm also received significantly more rainfall than the surrounding region that same growing season, a factor unrelated to the fertilizer blend.

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

Question 10 of 18 Craft and Structure

A crop yield researcher ran two irrigation schedules side by side on matching test plots, one watering daily in smaller amounts and the other watering less frequently in larger amounts. Soil moisture readings between the plots barely registered a difference worth mentioning. Final yield per acre was another matter, with the less-frequent watering plot pulling well ahead.

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 restaurant chain's inspection scores and a defense attorney's alibi claim.

Question 11 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A food safety inspector's annual report attributes a restaurant chain's improved inspection scores entirely to a new staff training program launched that year.

Text 2

The chain quietly replaced its aging commercial dishwashers at every location that same year, a detail company maintenance logs confirm but the inspector's report never mentions.

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

Question 12 of 18 Craft and Structure

Text 1

A criminal defense attorney's closing argument attributes her client's alibi entirely to a gas station receipt timestamped near the time of the crime.

Text 2

An investigator who reviewed the same receipt found the gas station's register clock was documented to run several minutes fast, a detail the defense's argument never addresses.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

Central Ideas and Details

These two questions reuse countenance and preponderance from Vocab Ep.35, this time asking what the passage means as a whole rather than what one word means.

Question 13 of 18 Information and Ideas

The extension agent made clear she would not countenance farmers skipping the soil testing step, regardless of how confident they felt about their land's condition.

Which choice best describes the main idea of the text?

Question 14 of 18 Information and Ideas

Despite a few inconsistencies in witness accounts, the preponderance of physical evidence, fingerprints, security footage, and phone records, all pointed toward the same conclusion.

Based on the text, which choice best describes the physical evidence in the case?

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 clinical psychologist believes that weekly check-in sessions, rather than the specific therapy technique used, are what most predict a patient's long-term treatment success.

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

Question 16 of 18 Information and Ideas

An agricultural extension agent argues that switching to drip irrigation has reduced water usage more than simply changing the crop rotation schedule would.

Which piece of evidence would most directly support the agent'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

A software QA team long assumed that features requiring the most lines of code would produce the most bugs after release, given their added complexity. A review of two years of bug-tracking data, however, shows that small, seemingly simple features actually generate more post-release bugs on average than large, complex ones. This suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Question 18 of 18 Information and Ideas

Genealogy researchers typically expect the oldest available records to be the least reliable, given how much can degrade or go missing over centuries, yet an analysis of one archive's holdings shows that records from the middle of the collection's timeline actually contain more transcription errors than the oldest records. This suggests that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

out of 18 correct

Question Distribution by Skill

How This Set Is Built

Set 35 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 continues the argument-and-analysis vocabulary from earlier sets in the 30s. Anecdotal, discredit, presumptuous, and prevaricate lean negative here, while consensus, objective, and rigorous stand out as the set's clearly positive words. The two Central Ideas questions close the vocabulary loop by reusing countenance and preponderance, 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 presumptuous and prevaricate 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, long-term treatment outcome, that the psychologist'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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