INFERENCES

1. In 2022, researchers rediscovered ancient indigenous glyphs, or drawings, on the walls of a

cave in Alabama. The cave's ceiling was only a few feet high, affording no position from
which the glyphs, being as wide as ten feet, could be viewed or photographed in their
entirety. However, the researchers used a technique called photogrammetry to assemble
numerous photos of the walls into a 3D model. They then worked with representatives of
tribes originally from the region, including the Chickasaw Nation, to understand the
significance of the animal and humanoid figures adorning the cave.
According to the text, what challenge did the researchers have to overcome to examine the
glyphs?
A. The cave was so remote that the researchers couldn't easily reach it.
B. Some of the glyphs were so faint that they couldn't be photographed.
C. The cave's dimensions prevented the researchers from fully viewing the glyphs.
D. The researchers were unable to create a 3D model of the cave.

2. Adaptations to cold temperatures have high metabolic costs. It is expensive, in terms of

energy use, for land plants and animals to withstand very cold temperatures, and it gets more
expensive the colder it gets, which means that the lower the air temperature, the fewer species
have evolved to survive it. This factor, in conjunction with the decline in air temperature with
increasing elevation, explains the distribution of species diversity in mountain ecosystems:
you find fewer species high up a mountain than at the mountain's base because ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. there are relatively few environments hospitable to species that are adapted to live
in low air temperatures.
B. there are relatively few species with the adaptations necessary to tolerate the
temperatures at high elevations.
C. adaptations that allow plants and animals to survive in rocky environments are
metabolically costly.
D. some mountain environments are at elevations so high that no plants or animals
can survive them.
3. Many animals, including humans, must sleep, and sleep is known to have a role in
everything from healing injuries to encoding information in long-term memory. But some
scientists claim that, from an evolutionary standpoint, deep sleep for hours at a time leaves an
animal so vulnerable that the known benefits of sleeping seem insufficient to explain why it
became so widespread in the animal kingdom. These scientists therefore imply that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. it is more important to understand how widespread prolonged deep sleep is than to
understand its function.
B. prolonged deep sleep is likely advantageous in ways that have yet to be discovered.
C. many traits that provide significant benefits for an animal also likely pose risks to
that animal.
D. most traits perform functions that are hard to understand from an evolutionary
standpoint.

4. Companies whose products are similar to competing products often pursue a marketing
strategy of brand differentiation, trying to get consumers to associate their brand with unique
attributes (e.g., to think of their brand of rice as the healthy brand, when in fact there is little
difference among brands of the same type of rice). Jaywant Singh and Francesca Dall'Olmo
Riley investigated consumer perceptions of such products, finding that consumers view
competing brands as having largely the same attributes and that any differences in the
strength of consumers' associations of brands with attributes are explained by differences in
market share—the more popular a brand is, the stronger people's associations with it
are—suggesting that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. consumers tend to perceive products with high market share more positively than
they perceive products with low market share.
B. marketing aimed at brand differentiation influences consumers’ perceptions of
branded products but not consumers’ purchasing behavior.
C. marketing efforts focused on brand differentiation do not have much effect on
consumers’ perceptions of branded products’ attributes.
D. differences in consumers’ perceptions of products’ attributes are less influenced by
brand differentiation than by actual differences between products.
5. Biologist Natacha Bodenhausen and colleagues analyzed the naturally occurring bacterial
communities associated with leaves and roots of wild Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering
plant. The researchers found many of the same bacterial genera in both the plants' leaves and
roots. To explain this, the researchers pointed to the general proximity of A. thaliana leaves to
the ground and noted that rain splashing off soil could bring soil-based bacteria into contact
with the leaves. Alternatively, the researchers noted that wind, which may be a source of
bacteria in the aboveground portion of plants, could also bring bacteria to the soil and roots.
Either explanation suggests that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. thaliana leaves and roots are especially vulnerable to harmful bacteria.
B. bacteria carried by wind are typically less beneficial to A. thaliana than soil-based
bacteria are.
C. many bacteria in A. thaliana leaves may have been deposited by means other than
rain.
D. some bacteria in A. thaliana leaves and roots may share a common source.

6. Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about detective Sherlock Holmes were published between
1887 and 1927. They have inspired countless successful adaptations, including comic strips,
movies, and a television series Sherlock Hound, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, who is
celebrated for his animated movies. Until 2014, these stories were copyrighted. The right to
adapt was only available to those who could afford the copyright fee and gain approval from
the strict copyright holders of Doyle's estate. Some journalists predict that the number of
Sherlock Holmes adaptations is likely to increase since the end of copyright means that
______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. producing adaptations will become easier and less expensive.
B. people will become more interested in detective stories than they were in the
1800s.
C. the former copyright holders of Doyle's estate will return fees they collected.
D. Doyle's original stories will become hard to find.

7. Tides can deposit large quantities of dead vegetation within a salt marsh, smothering
healthy plants and leaving a salt panne—a depression devoid of plants that tends to trap
standing water—in the marsh's interior. Ecologist Kathryn Beheshti and colleagues found that
burrowing crabs living within these pannes improve drainage by loosening the soil, leading
the pannes to shrink as marsh plants move back in. At salt marsh edges, however,
crab-induced soil loosening can promote marsh loss by accelerating erosion, suggesting that
the burrowing action of crabs ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. can be beneficial to marshes with small pannes but can be harmful to marshes with
large pannes.
B. may promote increases in marsh plants or decreases in marsh plants, depending on
the crabs' location.
C. tends to be more heavily concentrated in areas of marsh interiors with standing
water than at marsh edges.
D. varies in intensity depending on the size of the panel relative to the size of the
surrounding marsh.

8. In her 2021 article "Throwaway History: Towards a Historiography of Ephemera," scholar

Anne Garner discusses John Johnson (1882–1956), a devoted collector of items intended to
be discarded, including bus tickets and campaign pamphlets. Johnson recognized that
scholarly institutions considered his expansive collection of ephemera to be
worthless—indeed, it wasn't until 1968, after Johnson's death, that Oxford University's
Bodleian Library acquired the collection, having grasped the items' potential value to
historians and other researchers. Hence, the example of Johnson serves to ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. represent the challenge of incorporating examples of ephemera into the collections
of libraries and other scholarly institutions.
B. illustrate both the relatively low scholarly regard in which ephemera was once held
and the later recognition of ephemera's possible utility.
C. lend support to arguments by historians and other researchers who continue to
assert that ephemera holds no value for scholars.
D. demonstrate the difficulties faced by contemporary historians in conducting
research at the Bodleian Library without access to ephemera.

9. In many cultures, a handshake can create trust between people. Engineer Jo?o Avelino and
his team are designing a robot to shake hands with a human in order to improve human-robot
interactions. The robot hand adjusts its movements and pressure to better imitate the feel of a
human hand. The researchers want the robot's handshake to feel realistic because ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. people are less likely to interact with robots that don't look like humans.
B. it's easier to program a robot to perform handshakes than it is to program a robot to
perform some other types of greetings.
C. the robot in the researchers' study may have uses other than interacting with
humans.
D. lifelike handshakes may make people more comfortable interacting with robots.

10. Researchers Suchithra Rajendran and Maximilian Popfinger modeled varying levels of
passenger redistribution from short-haul flights (flights of 50 to 210 minutes, from takeoff to
landing) to high-speed rail trips. Planes travel faster than trains, but air travel typically
requires 3 hours of lead time for security, baggage handling, and boarding that rail travel
doesn't, so short-haul routes take similar amounts of time by air and by rail. However, the
model suggests that as rail passenger volumes approach current capacity limits, long lead
times emerge. Therefore, for rail to remain a viable alternative to short-haul flights, ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. rail systems should offer fewer long-haul routes and airlines should offer more
long-haul routes.
B. rail systems may need to schedule additional trains for these routes.
C. security, baggage handling, and boarding procedures used by airlines may need to
be implemented for rail systems.
D. passengers who travel by rail for these routes will need to accept that lead times
will be similar to those for air travel.

11. As the name suggests, dramaturges originated in theater, where they continue to serve a
variety of functions: conducting historical research for directors, compiling character
biographies for actors, and perhaps most importantly, helping writers of plays and musicals to
hone the works' stories and characters. Performance scholar Susan Manning observes that
many choreographers, like playwrights and musical theater writers, are concerned with
storytelling and characterization. In fact, some choreographers describe the dances they
create as expressions of narrative through movement; it is therefore unsurprising that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. some directors and actors rely too heavily on dramaturges to complete certain
research tasks.
B. choreographers developing dances with narrative elements frequently engage
dramaturges to assist in refining those elements.
C. dramaturges can have a profound impact on the artistic direction of plays and
musicals.
D. dances by choreographers who incorporate narrative elements are more accessible
to audiences than dances by choreographers who do not.

12. Off-off-Broadway theaters emerged in the late 1950s as a rebellion against mainstream
Broadway theaters in New York, freeing artists to create productions that were more
experimental than typical Broadway shows. One such artist was playwright María Irene
Fornés. Working with off-off Broadway theaters enabled Fornés not only to direct her own
plays but also to direct them exactly as she intended them to be staged, regardless of how
strange the results might have seemed to audiences accustomed to Broadway shows. In this
way, Fornés ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. would have been more famous if she had created plays that were mainstream
instead of experimental.
B. recognized that staging an off-off-Broadway play was more complicated than
staging a Broadway play.
C. wrote plays that would have been too expensive to produce if someone else had
directed the production.
D. illustrates the artistic opportunity offered by off-off Broadway theaters.

13. Gestures in painting are typically thought of as bold, expressive brushstrokes. In the
1970s, American painter Jack Whitten built a 12-foot (3.7-meter) tool he named the
"developer" to apply paint to an entire canvas in one motion, resulting in his series of "slab"
paintings from that decade. Whitten described this process as making an entire painting in
"one gesture," signaling a clear departure from the prevalence of gestures in his work from
the 1960s. Some art historians claim this shift represents "removing gesture" from the
process. Therefore, regardless of whether using the developer constitutes a gesture, both
Whitten and these art historians likely agree that ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. any tool that a painter uses to create an artwork is capable of creating gestures.
B. Whitten's work from the 1960s exhibits many more gestures than his work from
the 1970s does.
C. Whitten became less interested in exploring the role of gesture in his work as his
career progressed.
D. Whitten's work from the 1960s is much more realistic than his work from the
1970s is.

14. In their book Smart Pricing, Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang consider musicians' use
of the nontraditional "pay as you wish" pricing model. This model generally offers listeners
the choice to pay more or less than a suggested price for a song or album—or even to pay
nothing at all. As the authors note, that's the option most listeners chose for an album by the
band Harvey Danger. Only about 1% opted to pay for the album, resulting in earnings below
the band's expectations. But the authors also discuss musician Jane Siberry, who saw
significant earnings from her "pay as you wish" online music store as a result of many
listeners choosing to pay more than the store's suggested prices. Hence, the "pay as you wish"
model may ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. hold greater financial appeal for bands than for individual musicians.
B. cause most musicians who use the model to lower the suggested prices of their
songs and albums over time.
C. proved financially successful for some musicians but disappointing for others.
D. more strongly reflect differences in certain musicians' popularity than traditional
pricing models do.

15. Martin Dančák, Wewin Tjiasmanto, and colleagues have identified a new carnivorous
plant species (Nepenthes pudica) in Indonesia. Like other carnivorous plants, N. pudica has
pitfall traps, or pitchers, that capture prey, but unlike others, the pitchers of N. pudica are
located underground. The researchers unearthed the new species on fairly dry ridges with
surfaces that host few other plants and animals. Therefore, the researchers hypothesize that
the N. pudica species likely ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. is buried by nearby animals as they forage along the ridges for food.
B. evolved to have underground traps to access more prey than would surface traps.
C. formed pitchers early in development to absorb more moisture.
D. represents one of many undiscovered carnivorous plant species in the region.