INFERENCES

Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about detective Sherlock Holmes were published between 1887 and 1927. They have inspired
1. 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.
As the name suggests, dramaturges originated in theater, where they continue to serve a variety of functions: conducting historical
2. 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.
3. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is projected to maintain operation until at least 2030, but it has already revolutionized high-
resolution imaging of solar-system bodies in visible and ultraviolet (UV) light wavelengths, notwithstanding that only about 6% of
the bodies imaged by the HST are within the solar system. NASA researcher Cindy L. Young and colleagues assert that a new
space telescope dedicated exclusively to solar-system observations would permit an extensive survey of minor solar-system bodies
and long-term UV observation to discern how solar-system bodies change over time. Young and colleagues’ recommendation
therefore implies that the HST ______
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A. will likely continue to be used primarily to observe objects outside the solar system.
B. will no longer be used to observe solar system objects if the telescope recommended by Young and colleagues is deployed.
C. can be modified to observe the features of solar system objects that are of interest to Young and colleagues.
D. lacks the sensors to observe the wavelengths of light needed to discern how solar system bodies change over time.
In many cultures, a handshake can create trust between people. Engineer João Avelino and his team are designing a robot to shake
4. 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.
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. 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.
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 panne relative to the size of the surrounding marsh.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. “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.
In their book Smart Pricing, Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang consider musicians’ use of the nontraditional “pay as you wish”
11. 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. prove financially successful for some musicians but disappointing for others.
D. more strongly reflect differences in certain musicians’ popularity than traditional pricing models do.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. Political theorist: Even with the best spies, area experts, and satellite surveillance, foreign policy assessments can still lack
important information. In such circumstances intuitive judgment is vital. A national leader with such judgment can make good
decisions about foreign policy even when current information is incomplete, since _____________
Which of the following, if true, most logically completes the argument?
(A) the central reason for failure in foreign policy decision making is the absence of critical information
(B) those leaders whose foreign policy decisions have been highly ranked have also been found to have good intuitive
judgment
(C) both intuitive judgment and good information are required for sound decision making
(D) intuitive judgment can produce good decisions based on past experience, even when there are important gaps in current
information