Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-EI-036
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Expression of Ideas
Topic: Rhetorical Synthesis
Difficulty level: Medium

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While studying the history of telescopes, a student has taken the following notes:

Early refracting telescopes gathered light using glass lenses.
A lens bends different colors of light by slightly different amounts, ringing bright objects with colored fringes.
In 1668, Isaac Newton built a telescope that gathered light with a curved mirror instead of a lens.
A mirror reflects all colors of light by the same amount, so Newton's design showed no such fringes.

The student wants to explain an advantage of Newton's design over earlier refracting telescopes. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

AIn a refracting telescope, a glass lens bends incoming light to form an image of a distant object.

BBecause a mirror reflects all colors of light equally, Newton's 1668 telescope avoided the colored fringes that a lens produces around bright objects.

CNewton's 1668 telescope was an important step forward in the long history of astronomy. It was the sort of milestone that historians of astronomy return to again and again, a design whose importance is easy to assert without ever saying what it did better.

DRefracting telescopes gather light with lenses, and Newton's 1668 telescope gathered light with a curved mirror.

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