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Free SAT Cross-Text Connections practice questionsdigital SAT, 2026 format

Two short texts on one topic. You are asked how the author of one would respond to a claim in the other, or what both would agree on.

Answer each question, then read why the right answer is right and why the tempting one is wrong.

Question 1

Reading and Writing
Text 1
Electronic voting machines should be abandoned in favor of hand-marked paper ballots. Software can be altered without leaving a trace, and voters have no way to verify that the machine recorded the choice they made. A paper ballot, by contrast, is a physical record that can be recounted by hand.
 
Text 2
Hand-marked ballots have their own failure modes: ambiguous marks, stray pencil lines, and ovals filled in for two candidates. Machines that print a paper record after the voter makes selections on a screen combine the auditability of paper with the clarity of a machine-marked ballot. The choice is not between paper and machines but between systems that produce a verifiable paper record and systems that do not.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the claim made in Text 1?

Question 2

Reading and Writing
Text 1
The near-universal appearance of dragons in world mythology — serpentine, winged, often fire-breathing — is best explained by shared ancestral memory. Early humans faced large predatory reptiles and birds of prey; a composite of those threats, encoded as instinctive fear, surfaces in stories across cultures that had no contact with one another.
 
Text 2
The dragons of different cultures share far less than the ancestral-memory account requires. Chinese dragons are wingless, benevolent, and associated with water; European dragons are winged, hoarding, and associated with fire; Mesoamerican feathered serpents are neither. What the traditions have in common is only that large serpents appear in them — which is what one would expect wherever snakes exist and storytellers exaggerate. The similarity is in the label we apply, not in the creatures.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the claim made in Text 1?

Question 3

Reading and Writing
Text 1
City planners often plant fast-growing trees such as silver maples because they provide shade within a few years. In neighborhoods that have lost most of their canopy, that speed is the most important consideration, since residents need relief from summer heat now, not decades from now.
 
Text 2
Fast-growing trees deliver quick shade, but their wood is often weak, and many are short-lived. A street planted entirely with them may need to be replanted within thirty years, losing its shade all at once. Planting a mix of fast- and slow-growing species spreads that risk while still providing some shade early on.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the claim in Text 1?

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