Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-II-038
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Information and Ideas
Topic: Central Ideas and Details
Difficulty level: Easy

Practice Mode: Single selected Question » Back to Overview

Parchment, made from treated animal skin, was costly and hard-wearing, and medieval scribes did not always let an unwanted book stand in the way of a new one. When the text a manuscript held was no longer needed, a scribe could scrape and wash the ink from its pages and write something else across them. The result is a palimpsest: a page carrying a fresh text over the faint ghost of an erased one. For centuries the under-writing seemed lost for good. Today, however, imaging that photographs a page under many separate wavelengths of light can bring the scraped-away letters back into view. Using it, scholars have recovered treatises, letters, and songs that survive nowhere else, reading beneath the newer text to reach the older one a scribe had tried to remove.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

ABecause parchment was costly, medieval scribes often scraped the ink from old manuscripts so they could reuse the pages.

BMultispectral imaging has become the single most important tool available to historians of the medieval world.

CModern imaging can recover the erased under-writing of palimpsests, letting scholars read texts that survive nowhere else.

DMedieval scribes destroyed a great many older works by scraping parchment so they could reuse the pages.

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