Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-CS-036
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Craft and Structure
Topic: Text Structure and Purpose
Difficulty level: Hard

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We tend to hear a piece of music as a sequence of sounds, and to treat the silences between them as mere gaps — the places where nothing is happening. Yet a rest is no more an absence of music than a pause is an absence of speech. A well-placed silence gathers tension, sets off the phrase that follows it, and gives the ear a moment in which the last chord can go on ringing. The composer who writes a rest is not withholding sound; she is shaping time as deliberately as when she writes a note. To ignore the silences, then, is to misread the score — to mistake the frame for empty margin when it is in fact part of the picture.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

ATo trace how the use of rests in music has changed over the history of composition.

BTo explain the technical rules a composer follows when notating a rest within a score.

CTo challenge a common assumption by arguing that musical silences are a purposeful element rather than empty gaps.

DTo compare music with speech in order to show that the two arts obey fundamentally the same rules. On this reading the whole point is to show that music and speech obey the same underlying rules, an analogy the passage uses only in passing to make its real case.

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