StudyPebble

SAT: Completing an Example That Illustrates

Here the passage states a general claim and then begins an example with a blank at the end. You choose the completion that makes the example actually illustrate the claim. It is a logic question dressed as a reading question, and predicting before you read the choices is unusually effective.

The rule

The completion must name both variables from the claim and move them in the direction the claim predicts.

Read to the blank and state the claim in your own words, then ask what an example of it would have to show. If the claim is that a material becomes more flexible as it warms, then any illustration must involve a temperature increase paired with increased flexibility. Write that shape down mentally before looking at the choices.

Match the direction exactly. The most common wrong choice describes the same variables moving the wrong way, such as a material becoming more brittle as it warms. It is about the right subject, uses the right vocabulary, and illustrates the opposite of the claim. Checking direction eliminates it in a second.

Check that both variables from the claim appear. A choice that mentions only the temperature, or only the flexibility, is an incomplete example and cannot illustrate a relationship between two things. Relationships need both sides present in the illustration.

Be careful with choices that restate the claim instead of illustrating it. If the passage says the material becomes more flexible when warmed and the choice says the material responds to heat by becoming easier to bend, nothing has been illustrated. An example supplies a specific instance, a measurement, or a case, not a paraphrase.

Finally, read your chosen sentence together with the preceding sentence as one unit. The pair should read as claim followed by for instance. If it reads as claim followed by unrelated fact, or claim followed by the same claim again, you have the wrong choice even if every word in it is plausible.

The trap

Choosing a completion that uses the right subject matter but runs the relationship backward.

Try it

Try one
Real question

Using account books from a manor in fourteenth-century England, historian Edward Oduya compared the size of each year's wheat harvest with the price of wheat at a nearby market over five years. Accounts of this kind were drawn up each autumn by the reeve who ran the estate for its lord, and they record the grain threshed from each field beside the acreage sown, letting a yield per acre be reconstructed centuries later. Prices at the time depended heavily on local supply, since grain was costly to move over long distances. Oduya concluded that poor harvests drove wheat prices up: ______

Wheat Harvests and Prices on One English Manor
YearHarvest (bushels per acre)Price (pence per bushel)
1331116
133298
1333125
1334613
1335107

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to complete the statement?

Engineers have proposed that adding crushed volcanic ash to cement reduces cracking because the ash keeps reacting for years, slowly filling fine gaps. The idea is old: Roman builders mixed ash from the Bay of Naples into mortar that still stands today. The ash supplies silica that reacts with the lime cement releases. Skeptics counter that any improvement simply reflects the lower water content of ash mixtures. Materials researcher Lucía Terán set out to separate the two, casting ninety prisms, curing them in water baths, and measuring the pore space in each one.

Which finding, if true, would most strongly support the continuing-reaction explanation over the water-content explanation?

  • A) Ash mixtures were stronger than ordinary mixtures after one day.
  • B) Ash mixtures required less water to reach a workable consistency.
  • C) Ash mixtures and ordinary mixtures made with identical water content performed alike at one month, but the ash mixtures had far fewer fine gaps at two years. ✓
  • D) Ash mixtures cracked less than ordinary mixtures at every age tested.

Why: The question asks for evidence favoring the continuing reaction over lower water content, so water has to be matched and the benefit has to arrive late, which mixtures alike at one month and far fewer fine gaps at two years give. One finding is about the first day: Ash mixtures were stronger than ordinary mixtures after one day. An advantage within a day is far too early for a reaction said to run for years, and lower water content would produce it. Another states the skeptics' premise: Ash mixtures required less water to reach a workable consistency. Needing less water to reach workability is the rival explanation, not evidence against it. The last leaves water content uncontrolled: Ash mixtures cracked less than ordinary mixtures at every age tested. Less cracking at every age, including the earliest, is what the water explanation predicts too.

Practice more of these free

Questions students ask

How is this different from a regular evidence question?

A regular evidence question asks you to judge a finding against a claim. This one asks you to supply the example, so the correct answer must be a specific case rather than a general statement, and it must line up with the claim in both variables and direction.

Can the correct answer include a number I cannot verify?

Yes. These passages are constructed, so a specific figure in the completion is fine as long as it illustrates the claim correctly. Judge the logic of the example, not whether you could look the number up.

Guides that cover this

More on command of evidence