Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-CS-027
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Craft and Structure
Topic: Text Structure and Purpose
Difficulty level: Hard

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For most of the nineteenth century, botanists sorted lichens as simple plants — a single organism ranked among the mosses and ferns. The classification was not careless; under the microscopes of that era, a lichen genuinely looked like one continuous tissue. But when Simon Schwendener proposed, in the late 1860s, that a lichen is actually two organisms — a fungus sheltering an alga — living together, the tidy category came apart. What had seemed a single plant was in fact a partnership, and the finding forced naturalists to accept that an organism could be a collaboration rather than an individual.

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

AIt grants that the earlier classification was reasonable given the evidence available at the time, setting up the reversal the rest of the text describes.

BIt supplies technical detail about how nineteenth-century microscopes worked in order to explain the limits of period instruments. On this reading the sentence pauses to explain how the period’s microscopes worked and where their resolving power fell short, technical ground the passage never actually covers here.

CIt states the passage’s central claim, which the sentences that follow go on to illustrate with a specific example.

DIt offers evidence in support of Schwendener’s proposal that a lichen contains two organisms rather than one.

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