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SAT Reading and Writing Practice
Command of Evidence

Identify which piece of textual or quantitative evidence most directly supports a given claim.

56 original command of evidence questions in the SAT Ranker bank, with instant scoring and an Elo-based rank once you sign up. Below are a few free samples with full explanations.

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Sample question 1 · hard

A team studying urban heat argued that street trees measurably cool neighborhoods. To support the claim, they wanted evidence directly linking tree cover to lower temperatures on the ground.

Which finding would most strongly support the team's argument?

Residents of the tree-lined streets said that they felt noticeably cooler during the summer months than they had in previous years.
✓ On matched summer days, streets with dense tree cover recorded air temperatures several degrees lower than nearby treeless streets.
Tree-lined streets in the city tended to have property values higher than treeless streets did.
The city planted a good many more trees in the past decade than it had in the previous one.

The argument needs a direct link between tree cover and lower measured temperatures. Recorded temperatures several degrees lower on tree-covered streets, with days matched for comparison, provides exactly that. Perceptions, property values, and planting rates do not directly measure cooling.

Sample question 2 · hard

Marine restoration teams testing artificial reef structures made from 3D-printed ceramic reported that coral fragments attached to the structures grew at rates comparable to fragments on natural reef, and after eighteen months the printed structures supported measurably more fish species than nearby bare seafloor.

Which finding from the passage most directly supports the claim that 3D-printed reef structures can support marine biodiversity?

✓ After eighteen months, the structures supported measurably more fish species than nearby bare seafloor.
The reef structures were made from 3D-printed ceramic rather than from concrete or steel.
Coral fragments were attached to the structures by hand by the restoration teams at the outset of the project.
The restoration project ran for eighteen months across several separate stretches of reef.

A direct measured increase in fish species around the structures compared to bare seafloor is the evidence most directly supporting a biodiversity claim.

Sample question 3 · medium

A historian claims that a town's seventeenth-century prosperity rested on transit trade rather than on local manufacture. She notes that the town's warehouses were unusually large for its population.

Which finding, if true, would most strongly support the historian's claim?

The town's warehouses were built of stone rather than of the usual timber.
The town's population roughly doubled over the years between 1620 and 1680.
Several of the neighbouring towns also built warehouses of their own during the same decades of general prosperity.
✓ Probate inventories from the town list large stocks of goods that were not produced anywhere in the region.

Transit trade means goods passing through rather than being made locally, so inventories listing large stocks of goods produced nowhere in the region show exactly that. Population growth and stone construction are consistent with either explanation, and warehouses elsewhere say nothing about what this town's held.

Sample question 4 · medium

Historians argue that the optical telegraph, chains of signal towers relaying coded arms, gave Napoleonic France a speed of communication no courier system could approach.

Which finding, if true, would most strongly support the historians' argument?

✓ Dispatches that took relay riders three days to carry reached Paris from the coast in under an hour on clear days.
The towers of the optical telegraph were expensive for the state to build and required constant trained staffing to operate.
Operators of the signal towers trained for months before being trusted with an actual dispatch.
Fog and darkness could interrupt the optical telegraph for days at a time in some seasons.

The claim is a comparison of speeds, and only the finding that puts 3 days against under an hour makes that comparison directly. The cost of towers and the training of operators concern the system's price rather than its pace, and the fog finding cuts against the claim rather than for it.

Sample question 5 · medium

A linguist proposed that children acquire irregular verb forms by memorizing them individually rather than by applying a rule. She looked for evidence in the errors young children make.

Which finding would most directly support the linguist's proposal?

Irregular verbs are a good deal less common in English than regular ones, so children meet them far less often as they learn to speak.
Children learn the names of things before they learn the words for actions, and irregular verbs are concentrated among the latter.
Adults occasionally misuse irregular verb forms in their own speech, particularly with the verbs they rarely have occasion to use.
✓ Children often say 'goed' before later producing 'went' correctly, suggesting rules are overapplied where memory is incomplete.

The proposal is that irregulars are memorized individually. Children producing 'goed' before mastering 'went' shows the rule filling in where the memorized form has not yet been learned, supporting item-by-item memorization. The other findings don't bear on how irregulars specifically are acquired.

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