Question 33·200 Super-Hard SAT Reading Questions·Craft and Structure
Entomologist Nia Patel has proposed that evaluations of urban bee corridors report both adult bee abundance and nest survival. Some project managers object that monitoring nests is unnecessary because a corridor attracting many adult bees is already functioning as high-quality habitat. Flowering strips can draw foraging adults from surrounding areas, however, while pesticide residues in the strips' nesting soil kill developing larvae, allowing adult counts to remain high even as nests repeatedly fail. Patel argues that this possibility makes the second measure an essential check on the first.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
For a function question, identify the claim immediately before the underlined material and the conclusion immediately after it. Then determine whether the underlined sentence supports, challenges, qualifies, or explains those ideas, paying close attention to scope distinctions such as supplementing one measure versus replacing it.
Hints
Identify the objection
Determine what the project managers claim about the usefulness of adult bee counts.
Examine the contrast
Consider how the sentence relates the number of adult bees to the outcomes of nests.
Use the final sentence
Decide whether the underlined sentence supports, limits, or rejects the proposal described at the beginning.
Step-by-step Explanation
Identify the surrounding debate
Patel proposes evaluating bee corridors with both adult abundance and nest survival, but some managers argue that adult abundance alone is sufficient.
Determine what the sentence demonstrates
The underlined sentence presents a mechanism by which flowering strips attract many adult bees even though pesticide residues cause nests to fail. Thus, an apparently favorable adult count does not necessarily indicate successful reproduction.
Connect the mechanism to the conclusion
Because the two measures can produce different assessments of the same corridor, the sentence rebuts the claim that nest monitoring is unnecessary and supports Patel's two-measure proposal.