Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-II-025
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Information and Ideas
Topic: Central Ideas and Details
Difficulty level: Easy

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When a foraging honeybee returns to the hive after finding a rich patch of flowers, it often performs a looping, figure-eight movement on the vertical comb. The Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch spent years decoding this “waggle dance,” and in 1973 he shared a Nobel Prize for the work. He showed that the angle of the straight run encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun, while the duration of the waggling signals how far away it lies. Hive-mates crowd around the dancer, follow her movements, and then fly out toward the site she has described. The dance, in other words, is not mere excitement but a compact language for sharing the location of food.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

AVon Frisch's Nobel Prize proved that the communication of animals can be as complex as human language. On this reading the prize itself is offered as proof that animal signaling rivals human language in its complexity, a sweeping claim the passage never sets out to make.

BThe angle of a dancing bee's straight run corresponds to the direction of the food relative to the position of the sun.

CHoneybees depend on the waggle dance rather than on scent or sight to locate every source of food they visit.

DVon Frisch demonstrated that the honeybee's waggle dance functions as a system for communicating the location of food to other bees in the hive.

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