Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-CS-041
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Craft and Structure
Topic: Text Structure and Purpose
Difficulty level: Medium

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Consider the humble lichen. To a casual eye it is a single organism, a grey crust on a stone. In fact it is two: a fungus and an alga living as one, the fungus sheltering its partner while the alga feeds them both. Biologists once treated this arrangement as an oddity at the margins of their field. Today it looks more like a rule than an exception — symbiosis, not solitary struggle, may be the ordinary condition of life.

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

AIt presents the biological evidence that a lichen is composed of two organisms.

BIt records an earlier view of symbiosis that the passage goes on to overturn.

CIt restates, in scientific terms, the casual observer’s mistake described just before.

DIt states the passage’s central claim about the ordinary condition of life.

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