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SAT Section One : Critical Reading Sample Questions:

1. Since eating that ______ amount of food I have become ______.

A) substantial .. unchanged
B) impeccable .. fastidious
C) miniscule .. corpulent
D) prodigious .. bilious
E) gargantuan .. emaciated

2. Mathew ascended three flights of stairs--passed half-way down a long arched gallery--and knocked at
another old-fashioned oak door. This time the signal was answered. A low, clear, sweet voice, inside the
room, inquired who was waiting without? In a few hasty words Mathew told his errand. Before he had
done speaking the door was quietly and quickly opened, and Sarah Leeson confronted him on the
threshold, with her candle in her hand.
Not tall, not handsome, not in her first youth--shy and irresolute in manner--simple in dress to the utmost
limits of plainness--the lady's-maid, in spite of all these disadvantages, was a woman whom it was
impossible to look at without a feeling of curiosity, if not of interest. Few men, at first sight of her, could
have resisted the desire to find out who she was; few would have been satisfied with receiving for answer,
She is Mrs. Treverton's maid; few would have refrained from the attempt to extract some secret
information for themselves from her face and manner; and none, not even the most patient and practiced
of observers, could have succeeded in discovering more than that she must have passed through the
ordeal of some great suffering at some former period of her life. Much in her manner, and more in her face,
said plainly and sadly: I am the wreck of something that you might once have liked to see; a wreck that
can never be repaired--that must drift on through life unnoticed, unguided, unpitied--drift till the fatal shore
is touched, and the waves of Time have swallowed up these broken relics of me forever.
This was the story that was told in Sarah Leeson's face--this, and no more. No two men interpreting that
story for themselves, would probably have agreed on the nature of the suffering which this woman had
undergone. It was hard to say, at the outset, whether the past pain that had set its ineffaceable mark on
her had been pain of the body or pain of the mind. But whatever the nature of the affliction she had
suffered, the traces it had left were deeply and strikingly visible in every part of her face.
Her cheeks had lost their roundness and their natural color; her lips, singularly flexible in movement and
delicate in form, had faded to an unhealthy paleness; her eyes, large and black and overshadowed by
unusually thick lashes, had contracted an anxious startled look, which never left them and which piteously
expressed the painful acuteness of her sensibility, the inherent timidity of her disposition. So far, the
marks which sorrow or sickness had set on her were the marks common to most victims of mental or
physical suffering. The one extraordinary personal deterioration which she had undergone consisted in
the unnatural change that had passed over the color of her hair.
It was as thick and soft, it grew as gracefully, as the hair of a young girl; but it was as gray as the hair of an
old woman. It seemed to contradict, in the most startling manner, every personal assertion of youth that
still existed in her face. With all its haggardness and paleness, no one could have looked at it and
supposed for a moment that it was the face of an elderly woman. Wan as they might be, there was not a
wrinkle in her cheeks. Her eyes, viewed apart from their prevailing expression of uneasiness and timidity,
still preserved that bright, clear moisture which is never seen in the eyes of the old. The skin about her
temples was as delicately smooth as the skin of a child. These and other physical signs which never
mislead, showed that she was still, as to years, in the very prime of her life.
Sickly and sorrow-stricken as she was, she looked, from the eyes downward, a woman who had barely
reached thirty years of age. From the eyes upward, the effect of her abundant gray hair, seen in
connection with her face, was not simply incongruous--it was absolutely startling; so startling as to make it
no paradox to say that she would have looked most natural, most like herself if her hair had been dyed. In
her case, Art would have seemed to be the truth, because Nature looked like falsehood.
What shock had stricken her hair, in the very maturity of its luxuriance, with the hue of an unnatural old
age? Was it a serious illness, or a dreadful grief that had turned her gray in the prime of her womanhood?
That question had often been agitated among her fellow-servants, who were all struck by the peculiarities
of her personal appearance, and rendered a little suspicious of her, as well, by an inveterate habit that
she had of talking to herself. Inquire as they might, however, their curiosity was always baffled. Nothing
more could be discovered than that Sarah Leeson was, in the common phrase, touchy on the subject of
her gray hair and her habit of talking to herself, and that Sarah Leeson's mistress had long since forbidden
every one, from her husband downward, to ruffle her maid's tranquility by inquisitive questions.
In context, the word "wan" in the passage most nearly means

A) pale.
B) pink.
C) round.
D) pretty.
E) shapely.

3. Alston was impressed by the philosopher's lecture, but Mario thought the lecture was better characterized
as ______ than as erudite.

A) specious
B) impeccable
C) fictitious
D) translucent
E) recondite

4. The following two passages deal with the political movements working for the woman's vote in America.
The first organized assertion of woman's rights in the United States was made at the Seneca Falls
convention in 1848. The convention, though, had little immediate impact because of the national issues
that would soon embroil the country. The contentious debates involving slavery and state's rights that
preceded the Civil War soon took center stage in national debates.
Thus woman's rights issues would have to wait until the war and its antecedent problems had been
addressed before they would be addressed. In 1869, two organizations were formed that would play
important roles in securing the woman's right to vote. The first was the American Woman's Suffrage
Association (AWSA). Leaving federal and constitutional issues aside, the AWSA focused their attention
on state-level politics. They also restricted their ambitions to securing the woman's vote and downplayed
discussion of women's full equality. Taking a different track, the National Woman's Suffrage Association
(NWSA), led by Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, believed that the only way to assure the long-
term security of the woman's vote was to ground it in the constitution. The NWSA challenged the
exclusion of woman from the Fifteenth Amendment, the amendment that extended the vote to
African-American men. Furthermore, the NWSA linked the fight for suffrage with other inequalities faced
by woman, such as marriage laws, which greatly disadvantaged women.
By the late 1880s the differences that separated the two organizations had receded in importance as the
women's movement had become a substantial and broad-based political force in the country. In 1890, the
two organizations joined forces under the title of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association
(NAWSA). The NAWSA would go on to play a vital role in the further fight to achieve the woman's vote.
In 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-eighth state to approve the constitutional amendment
securing the woman's right to vote, woman's suffrage became enshrined in the constitution. But woman's
suffrage did not happen in one fell swoop. The success of the woman's suffrage movement was the story
of a number of partial victories that led to the explicit endorsement of the woman's right to vote in the
constitution.
As early as the 1870s and 1880s, women had begun to win the right to vote in local affairs such as
municipal elections, school board elections, or prohibition measures. These "partial suffrages"
demonstrated that women could in fact responsibly and reasonably participate in a representative
democracy (at least as voters). Once such successes were achieved and maintained over a period of
time, restricting the full voting rights of woman became more and more suspect. If women were helping
decide who was on the local school board, why should they not also have a voice in deciding who was
president of the country? Such questions became more difficult for non-suffragists to answer, and thus the
logic of restricting the woman's vote began to crumble
Which of the following does the first passage say was the first organized push for woman's suffrage?

A) Tennessee passing the Twenty-Second Amendment
B) convening of the Seneca Falls convention
C) formation of the National Woman's Suffrage Association
D) "partial suffrages" of local woman's suffrage efforts
E) formation of the American Woman's Suffrage Association

5. But the Dust-Bin was going down then, and your father took but little, excepting from a liquid point of view.
Your mother's object in those visits was of a house-keeping character, and you was set on to whistle your
father out. Sometimes he came out, but generally not. Come or not come, however, all that part of his
existence which was unconnected with open Waitering was kept a close secret, and was acknowledged
by your mother to be a close secret, and you and your mother flitted about the court, close secrets both of
you, and would scarcely have confessed under torture that you know your father, or that your father had
any name than Dick (which wasn't his name, though he was never known by any other), or that he had
kith or kin or chick or child.
Perhaps the attraction of this mystery, combined with your father's having a damp compartment, to
himself, behind a leaky cistern, at the Dust Bin, a sort of a cellar compartment, with a sink in it, and a smell,
and a plate-rack, and a bottle-rack, and three windows that didn't match each other or anything else, and
no daylight, caused your young mind to feel convinced that you must grow up to be a Waiter too; but you
did feel convinced of it, and so did all your brothers, down to your sister. Every one of you felt convinced
that you was born to the Waitering.
At this stage of your career, what was your feelings one day when your father came home to your mother
in open broad daylight, of itself an act of Madness on the part of a Waiter, and took to his bed (leastwise,
your mother and family's bed), with the statement that his eyes were devilled kidneys. Physicians being in
vain, your father expired, after repeating at intervals for a day and a night, when gleams of reason and old
business fitfully illuminated his being, "Two and two is five. And three is sixpence." Interred in the
parochial department of the neighbouring churchyard, and accompanied to the grave by as many Waiters
of long standing as could spare the morning time from their soiled glasses (namely, one), your bereaved
form was attired in a white neckankecher [sic], and you was took on from motives of benevolence at The
George and Gridiron, theatrical and supper. Here, supporting nature on what you found in the
plates(which was as it happened, and but too often thoughtlessly, immersed in mustard), and on what you
found in the glasses (which rarely went beyond driblets and lemon), by night you dropped asleep standing,
till you was cuffed awake, and by day was set to polishing every individual article in the coffee-room. Your
couch being sawdust; your counterpane being ashes of cigars. Here, frequently hiding a heavy heart
under the smart tie of your white neck ankecher (or correctly speaking lower down and more to the left),
you picked up the rudiments of knowledge from an extra, by the name of Bishops, and by calling
plate-washer, and gradually elevating your mind with chalk on the back of the corner-box partition, until
such time as you used the inkstand when it was out of hand, attained to manhood, and to be the Waiter
that you find yourself.
I could wish here to offer a few respectful words on behalf of the calling so long the calling of myself and
family, and the public interest in which is but too often very limited. We are not generally understood. No,
we are not. Allowance enough is not made for us. For, say that we ever show a little drooping listlessness
of spirits, or what might be termed indifference or apathy. Put it to yourself what would your own state of
mind be, if you was one of an enormous family every member of which except you was always greedy,
and in a hurry. Put it to yourself that you was regularly replete with animal food at the slack hours of one in
the day and again at nine p.m., and that the repleter [sic] you was, the more voracious all your
fellow-creatures came in. Put it to yourself that it was your business, when your digestion was well on, to
take a personal interest and sympathy in a hundred gentlemen fresh and fresh (say, for the sake of
argument, only a hundred), whose imaginations was given up to grease and fat and gravy and melted
butter, and abandoned to questioning you about cuts of this, and dishes of that, each of 'em going on as if
him and you and the bill of fare was alone in the world.
What term best describes the overall tone toward waiters in this excerpt?

A) apologetic
B) satiric
C) informational
D) empathetic
E) belittling

Solutions: