Free SAT Text Structure and Purpose practice questionsdigital SAT, 2026 format
Why did the author write this, or how is it built? Questions ask for the main purpose, the overall structure, or the function of one underlined sentence inside the whole.
Answer each question, then read why the right answer is right and why the tempting one is wrong.
Question 1
Reading and Writing
For centuries, shepherds in the Landes region of southwestern France walked on wooden stilts more than a meter tall. The region was then a vast, marshy plain where sheep grazed on sparse grass, and a person on foot sank into the wet ground and could see only a short distance. From the stilts, a shepherd could cross the marsh quickly and keep watch over a flock spread across a wide area. When the marshes were drained and planted with pine forests in the nineteenth century, the stilts disappeared from daily life.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
Question 2
Reading and Writing
For years, the standard explanation for the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was drought. Rainfall across the southern Plains did fall sharply between 1931 and 1939, and the region's prairie grasses would have withered under any circumstances. Yet drought alone cannot account for dust storms that carried topsoil as far as Washington, D.C. Historians now point to the plowing of some 30 million acres of native grassland in the preceding decade, which stripped away the root systems that had anchored the soil through earlier dry spells.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
Question 3
Reading and Writing
Spider silk is often called the strongest natural fiber, but the comparison is misleading. Measured by tensile strength alone, some spider silks do rival steel of the same thickness. What makes silk remarkable, however, is toughness — the energy it can absorb before breaking. A strand can stretch to nearly half again its length, converting the impact of a flying insect into heat rather than snapping. Steel, by contrast, is strong but brittle by comparison; it would shatter under the same sudden load.
Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?
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