SAT Reading and Writing — Đề mẫu 01

Restoring an old wooden boat is rarely a matter of a single dramatic repair. Most of the work is ______: a plank replaced here, a seam recaulked there, a coat of varnish laid down and then sanded almost entirely away.

Because the desert receives so little rain, its plants must ______ every drop that falls. Some species send a taproot more than ten metres down; others spread a shallow mat of roots that catches water before it can sink out of reach.

Early critics dismissed the composer’s late quartets as formless. Recent scholarship has been far more ______, arguing that what sounds like formlessness is in fact a deliberate structure built on repetition rather than on contrast.

The archive’s catalogue is famously ______: a single box may be listed only as “miscellaneous correspondence, 1890s,” leaving researchers to open it and find out for themselves what is inside.

The following text is a poem about a river in winter.

The river does not stop; it only slows,

and where it slows the cold can take a grip.

By January every current shows

a white seam widening along the lip.

Beneath, the water keeps its old routine,

indifferent to the lid above its head,

and carries silt and minnows, all unseen,

the way a sleeper carries what is said.

In March the seam gives way without a sound.

No one is there. The river, having gone

nowhere at all, is once again unbound,

and what had looked like ending was a pause.

The following text is from an essay about the history of street lighting.

The first public gas lamps were mocked. Newspapers of the 1810s complained that the light was harsh, the fittings ugly, and the expense absurd for a convenience that only the sleepless would ever use. Within twenty years the same papers were running indignant letters about streets that had not yet been lit. The technology had not improved a great deal in that time. What had changed was the hour at which ordinary people expected to be out of doors.

Text 1

Museums have begun printing far longer wall labels, sometimes three hundred words beside a single painting. Curators defend the practice on grounds of fairness: visitors arrive with very different backgrounds, and a label that explains who commissioned a work, and why, gives everyone the same starting point.

Text 2

Eye-tracking work in three European galleries found that visitors given a long label spent, on average, less total time looking at the painting itself than visitors given a one-line label. The researchers were careful not to call long labels useless. They noted only that attention is finite, and that a label competes with the object for it.

Text 1

For decades the standard advice to new runners was to stretch before running. The reasoning was mechanical: a warm, lengthened muscle was thought to resist tearing better than a cold, short one.

Text 2

A review of forty trials found no reduction in injury rates among runners who stretched before exercise. Injury rates tracked one variable closely — how quickly a runner had increased weekly distance — and tracked pre-run stretching not at all.

The following text is from a short story. Amara has taken over a bakery in a coastal town.

The ovens were older than Amara and did not pretend otherwise. The left one ran hot along the bottom, the right one hot at the back, and neither had a dial that could be trusted within thirty degrees. For the first month she burned things. Then she stopped reading the dials altogether and started reading the loaves — the way the crust went from pale to gold at one corner first, the sound the base made under a knuckle. By August she could not have told a stranger what temperature she baked at, and she no longer had any use for the number.

The following text is from an article about seed dispersal.

A fruit is an expensive thing for a plant to build, and plants do not build them for nothing. The sugar is a fee, paid to an animal in exchange for carrying seeds away from the parent — far enough that the seedling will not have to compete with the tree that made it. The arrangement fails when the fee is collected without the service being rendered. A seed predator cracks the seed and eats that instead, taking the payment and leaving nothing to be carried.

A student is writing about a collection of short stories set in a shipyard. The student claims that the collection’s narrator is most interested in the moment at which a difficult skill has become so practiced that the worker who has it no longer notices it.

In a study of urban foxes, researchers measured “flight initiation distance” — how close a stationary person can be approached before the animal moves away. They compared foxes living in the dense city centre with foxes living in the outer suburbs. The researchers hypothesized that central foxes would show less avoidance of motionless people, because central foxes encounter motionless people far more often.

Germination Rate of Four Seed Treatments

Many desert shrubs produce seeds with a coat so hard that water cannot reach the embryo. Researchers tested four treatments on seeds of one such shrub: leaving the seeds untreated, soaking them in water for twenty-four hours, scarifying them (nicking the coat with a blade), and scarifying and then soaking them. On the basis of the results, the researchers concluded that ______

Number of Bird Species Recorded at Two Wetland Sites, 2005–2020

In 2010 conservationists restored the water regime at Wetland A, allowing seasonal flooding to resume there. Wetland B, a site of similar size a few kilometres away, was left unmanaged. Annual bird surveys carried out at both sites from 2005 to 2020 suggest that ______

Sourdough starters are often described as “wild,” but a starter kept in one kitchen for years is not a random sample of the local air. Each feeding rewards the microbes that thrive on that flour, at that temperature, on that schedule, and starves the rest. After enough cycles, the population inside the jar reflects the baker’s habits at least as much as it reflects ______

The Hōryū-ji temple complex in Nara contains what are believed to be the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the ______ and dendrochronologists have dated some of its timbers to the seventh century.

The seed ______ which is buried in a mountainside on a Norwegian island well above sea level, holds duplicate samples from gene banks around the world.

The expedition placed its three supply depots at carefully chosen ______ at the foot of the glacier, where sledges could be reloaded; at the pass, where the weather turned first; and on the plateau, where the final stretch began.

Two of the instruments aboard the probe — a magnetometer and a dust ______ were designed and built by university teams rather than by the space agency itself.

The collection of letters, notebooks, and unfinished drafts that the writer left to the university library ______ never been fully catalogued.

By the time the survey team reached the summit ridge in 1954, three earlier expeditions ______ to map it, and all three had turned back at the same icefall.

Each of the volunteer groups keeps ______ own record of the birds it counts, and the totals are combined only at the end of the season.

Concrete gains most of its strength in the first month after it is poured. ______ it goes on hardening for decades, and a fifty-year-old bridge deck may be measurably stronger than it was on the day it opened to traffic.

Ravens can be taught to exchange a token for food, and a raven will hold on to a token overnight if it has learned that the exchange will be offered again in the morning. ______ the birds appear able to act on a benefit that is not yet in front of them.

Nearly all of the island’s building stone was quarried within a few kilometres of where it was used. The columns of the harbour temple, ______ came from a quarry more than two hundred kilometres away, on the mainland.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Peat bogs cover about 3 percent of the world’s land surface.

• Peat forms when dead plant material decays very slowly in waterlogged ground.

• Draining a peatland exposes the peat to air, and the exposed peat releases carbon dioxide as it decays.

• Peat bogs hold roughly twice as much carbon as all of the world’s forests combined.

The student wants to emphasize the contrast between the small area that peat bogs occupy and the large amount of carbon they hold.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The Antikythera mechanism is a geared bronze device recovered from a shipwreck in 1901.

• It contains at least thirty interlocking bronze gears.

• It was used to predict the positions of the sun and moon and the dates of eclipses.

• No device of comparable mechanical complexity is known from the following fourteen centuries.

The student wants to convey the mechanism’s complexity to an audience unfamiliar with it.

For an animal that has been photographed millions of times, the giant panda remains oddly ______: basic questions about how wild pandas find and choose a mate are still argued over by the people who study them.

The commission’s recommendations were ______ enough that the union and the management each announced the same afternoon that its own position had been endorsed. That may well have been the point.

Traditional navigators in the Pacific did not treat wind, swell, and star paths as three separate systems. Each was read against the other two, so that a sign which seemed unambiguous on its own was ______ by whatever the others indicated.

Although the museum bought the sculpture as the work of a single master, later analysis of the bronze alloy ______ that attribution, and the wall label now reads simply “workshop of.”

The following text is from a novel. Ilse has returned to the town where she grew up.

Nothing had been torn down, which was the disorienting part. She had prepared herself for absence — the bakery gone, the cinema turned into a car park — and instead every building stood exactly where she had left it, painted a different colour. The bakery sold phones. The cinema sold furniture. She walked the length of the main street twice and could not decide whether she had been handed her childhood back or had it taken away more thoroughly than any demolition would have managed.

The following text is from an article about the standardization of screw threads.

Before the 1840s a screw and its nut were a matched pair. One machinist cut both, and the pair fitted each other and nothing else; losing a nut meant cutting a new one by hand to match the screw you still had. The proposal to fix the angle and pitch of threads by common agreement was resisted at the time as an interference with the craft. What it actually did was make any individual screw worthless and the supply of screws effectively limitless.

Text 1

Advocates of the four-day working week point to trials in which output held steady while hours fell. If a firm can produce as much in thirty-two hours as in forty, the argument runs, then the extra eight hours were never producing anything in the first place.

Text 2

Almost every published four-day-week trial is voluntary: a firm decides to try the schedule and then reports its own results. Firms that expect the experiment to go badly do not tend to volunteer, and firms whose experiments do go badly do not tend to publish. Whatever these trials measure, it is not the average firm.

Text 1

The oldest known cave paintings were long assumed to be the work of a single tradition spreading outward from one region, since the images resemble one another closely across thousands of kilometres.

Text 2

Uranium-series dates from three widely separated sites now place the earliest paintings at each within a few thousand years of one another — far too close together for any plausible rate of transmission on foot. The resemblance may say more about what human hands and human eyes find easy than about who taught whom.

The following text is from an article about repairing historic buildings.

A conservator’s first question is not how to make the damage disappear but how much of the building’s history will be erased along with it. A wall patched six times over three centuries carries a record of six failures and six responses to them. Sand it smooth and the wall looks as it did when new — which is to say it looks like a wall nobody has ever used. The repair that reads as a repair is very often the honest one.

The following text is from an article about desalination.

Reverse osmosis pushes seawater against a membrane fine enough to hold salt back. The energy cost of that push is set almost entirely by the salt: the saltier the feed water, the harder the push has to be. This is why brackish groundwater, at about a fifth the salinity of seawater, can be desalinated for a fraction of the energy — and why the brine left behind by a seawater plant, saltier than what went in, is the most expensive water on the site to treat any further.

A student is writing about a collection of poems set in a mountain village. The student claims that the collection repeatedly borrows the language of accounting — debts, columns, sums — to describe things that cannot in fact be counted.

In a set of medieval manuscripts, marginal notes appear far more often on pages describing practical procedures than on pages of doctrine. Researchers proposed that the notes were written by readers who were using the manuscripts as working references rather than reading them straight through.

Mean Estimated Minus Recorded Journey Time, by Mode (minutes)

Researchers asked four groups of commuters in the same city to estimate how long their journey to work had taken that morning, then compared each estimate with the time recorded by a tracking application. Averaging the difference within each group, the researchers found that ______

Weekday Traffic Counts on Residential Streets, 2012–2022

A city introduced a residential parking permit scheme in one district in 2016 and left an adjacent district of similar size unchanged. Weekday traffic counts taken on residential streets in both districts between 2012 and 2022 indicate that ______

A museum that lends an object abroad must insure it, and the premium is calculated from a declared value. For objects that are never sold — a mummy, a meteorite, a set of royal regalia — no market price exists, so the declared value is negotiated between the lender and the insurer. The resulting figure is therefore best understood not as what the object is worth but as ______

The bridge’s original cables were replaced in ______ the replacements are themselves now approaching the end of their design life.

Among the objects recovered from the wreck were a brass ______ a set of navigational dividers, and a stoneware jar still sealed with wax.

Because the tide runs hardest through the narrows at the head of the ______ the ferry crosses only within an hour of slack water.

The report names three obstacles to the scheme: the cost of the tunnelling ______ the difficulty of acquiring land along the route; and the need for a new depot at the northern end of the line.

On the wall behind the counter ______ a row of photographs showing the shop as it looked in each decade since 1920.

The two committees published ______ findings on the same morning, and several newspapers treated the coincidence as deliberate.

The training programme asks each recruit to plot a course, to estimate the drift, and ______ the result against a fixed landmark before setting out.

Aluminium is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust. ______ it remained a precious metal until the 1880s, because separating it from its ore took more electricity than anyone could supply cheaply.

A bee returning to the hive performs a looping dance whose angle encodes the direction of a food source and whose duration encodes its distance. ______ a forager that has never left the hive can be sent to one flowering tree several kilometres away.

Most of the manuscript is written in one hand, in brown ink, at a steady slope. The final four leaves, ______ are in a second hand, in black ink, and were plainly added later.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The Tabula Peutingeriana is a medieval copy of a Roman road map.

• It measures about 6.75 metres long but only 34 centimetres high.

• Those proportions compress north–south distances far more than east–west ones.

• It records the road distance between stops rather than accurate geography.

The student wants to explain to an audience unfamiliar with the map why it looks so unlike a modern one.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• A whale fall is the carcass of a large whale that has sunk to the deep seafloor.

• A single carcass can supply a deep-sea community for several decades.

• At least sixty species are known only from whale falls.

• The deep seafloor otherwise receives very little food from the waters above it.

The student wants to emphasize how ecologically important whale falls are to the deep sea.