SAT Reading Practice Test Questions-: Science based

Questions 42–52 are based on the following passage and supplementary material.

This passage is excerpted from Thomas Hayden, “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” ©2009 by Smithsonian Magazine.

[The] first public airing of Darwinian evolution caused almost no stir whatsoever. But when Darwin published his ideas in book form the following year, the reaction was quite different. On the Line 5 Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life soon sold out its first press run of 1,250 copies, and within a year some 4,250 copies were in circulation. Allies applauded it as a brilliant unifying Line 10 breakthrough; scientific rivals called attention to the gaps in his evidence, including what would come to be known as “missing links” in the fossil record; and prominent clergymen, politicians and others condemned the work and its far-reaching implications. Line 15 In 1864 Benjamin Disraeli, later Britain’s prime minister, famously decried the idea—barely mentioned in Origin—that human beings too had evolved from earlier species. “Is man an ape or an angel?” he asked rhetorically at a conference. “I, my lord, I am on the Line 20 side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence those newfangled theories:’ Darwin knew that plant and animal species could be sorted into groups by similarity, such that birds clustered into songbirds and raptors, say, with each Line 25 group subdivided again and again down to dozens or hundreds of distinct species. He also saw that the individuals within any given species, despite many similarities, also differed from one another—and some of those differences were passed from parents to their Line 30 offspring. And Darwin observed that nature had a brutally efficient method of rewarding any variation that helped an individual live longer, breed faster or leave more progeny. The reward for being a slightly faster or more alert antelope? The lions would eat Line 35 your slower neighbors first, granting you one more day in which to reproduce. After many generations and a great deal of time, the whole population would run faster, and with many such changes over time eventually become a new species. Evolution, Darwin’s Line 40 “descent with modification through natural selection;’ would have occurred. But what was the source of variation and what was the mechanism for passing change from generation to generation? Darwin “didn’t know anything about Line 45 why organisms resemble their parents, or the basis of heritable variations in populations:’ says Niles Eldredge, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In Darwin’s era, the man who did make progress Line 50 on the real mechanism of inheritance was the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel In his abbey garden in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Mendel bred pea plants and found that the transmission of traits such as flower color and seed texture followed observable rules. An Line 55 offspring inherits a set of these genetic units from each parent. Since the early 1900s, those units of inheritance have been known as genes. The objection certainly applied to the paucity of ancestral human fossils in Darwin’s time. Years Line 60 of painstaking work by paleontologists, however, have filled in many of the important gaps. There are many more extinct species to be discovered, but the term “missing link” has for the most part become as outdated as the idea of special creation Line 65 for each species. Anthropologists once depicted human evolution as a version of the classic “March of Progress” image—a straight line from a crouching proto-ape, through successive stages of knuckle draggers and culminating in upright modern Line 70 human beings. “It was a fairly simple picture, but it was a simplicity born of ignorance,” says biological anthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York. “The last 30 years have seen an explosion of new finds:’ Line 75 Asked about gaps in Darwin’s knowledge, Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California at Irvine, laughs. “That’s easy:’ he says. “Darwin didn’t know 99 percent of what we know:” Which may sound bad, Ayala goes on, but “the 1 percent he did know was Line 80 the most important part:”

42. Over the course of the passage, the main focus shifts from

1. a description of Darwin’s life to an overview of Darwin’s published works.
2. detailed criticism of Darwin’s controversial theory to qualified support for that theory.
3. Darwin’s explanation of a scientific mystery to a summary of how other scientists facilitated that mystery’s resolution.
4. the initial reception for Darwin’s work to a broader discussion of how his findings continue to guide scientific research.

43. The author most strongly suggests that the largest reason Darwin’s intellectual competitors took issue with his work was that it

1. didn’t present a complete explanation of the hypothesized phenomenon.
2. presented ideas that didn’t match what the church believed.
3. offended readers with its absurd questions.
4. unified what had been intentionally disparate ideas.

44. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

1. Lines 9–10 (“Allies…breakthrough”)
2. Lines 10–12 (“scientific…record”)
3. Lines 15–18 (“In 1864…species”)
4. Lines 20–21 (“I repudiate…theories”)

45. The main purpose of the reference to lions in line 34 is to

1. disprove a questionable theory.
2. introduce a completely new idea.
3. reject a burgeoning controversy.
4. provide a clarifying example.

46. Which statement best describes the technique the author uses to advance the main point of the third paragraph (lines 42–48)?

1. He ponders an unproven possibility to highlight the utility of Darwin’s research.
2. He poses a question that puzzled those of Darwin’s era to foreshadow a forthcoming finding.
3. He presents a criticism from an expert to disprove the theory presented by Darwin.
4. He undermines the importance of Darwin’s theory by discussing the work of another scientist.

47. The author notes that those who criticized Darwin’s work when it first came out were

1. misguided in attacking scientific discovery based solely on the work of another scientist.
2. transparent in their jealous slander against his success.
3. mistaken because other scientists had already proven what Darwin had not.
4. correct in their complaints that his theory lacked sufficient supporting evidence.