Free SAT Practice Question

Question 1 of 1
ID: SAT-RW-EI-050
Section: SAT Reading & Writing (RW) – Expression of Ideas
Topic: Rhetorical Synthesis
Difficulty level: Hard

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While researching how wooden buildings are dated, a student has taken the following notes:

A dendrochronologist studies the annual growth rings in old timber.
A tree adds a wide ring in a wet year and a narrow ring in a dry year.
Over many decades, a region's run of wet and dry years leaves a distinctive sequence of wide and narrow rings shared by its trees.
Researchers have compiled regional “master charts” that record these ring sequences year by year across centuries.

The student wants to explain how growth rings let researchers assign a calendar year to a wooden beam. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

AGrowth rings hold a surprising amount of information and have proven useful to researchers in many fields. They turn up in studies of climate, of past fires, of river floods, and of countless other questions where a year-by-year record of a tree’s life happens to preserve exactly the trace an investigator needs.

BBecause a tree lays down a wide ring in a wet year and a narrow ring in a dry year, its rings preserve a record of the region's past weather.

CA dendrochronologist studies the rings in old timber, and regional master charts record ring sequences across many centuries.

DBecause a region's wet and dry years leave the same distinctive sequence of wide and narrow rings in its trees, researchers can match a beam's ring pattern to a dated master chart and read off the calendar year of its outermost ring.

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