Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-II-036
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Information and Ideas
Topic: Inferences
Difficulty level: Hard

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Excavators at a Bronze Age settlement in northern Europe uncovered dozens of deep-blue glass beads. Because the settlement operated its own furnaces and lay beside abundant sand, researchers had long assumed the beads were made on-site from local materials. But when the archaeologist Halvard Ness measured the trace-element signatures locked in the glass, he found that they matched the output of specific workshops far to the south—thousands of kilometers away—and matched no local source. If Ness's measurements are reliable, they suggest that ____

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Athe settlement's local furnaces were used mainly to produce ornaments other than glass beads.

Bthe beads were, after all, produced in the settlement's own furnaces from the sand found nearby.

Cthe distant southern workshops depended on northern settlements as their main customers. On this picture the northern settlement was not just a buyer but the mainstay of those distant workshops, a commercial dependence the trace-element match cannot begin to establish.

Dthe community acquired at least some of its goods through exchange networks reaching much farther than its own local production would suggest.

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