SAT — evidence from graphs: support, weaken, complete the statement
In the Information and Ideas domain of the SAT Reading and Writing section, some questions pair a short text with an informational graphic, usually a bar graph, a line graph or a table. The question then asks which choice most effectively uses data from the graphic to support a claim, which choice describes data that weaken it, or which choice completes a statement accurately. These Command of Evidence (Quantitative) questions test two skills at once: reading the graphic without error, and seeing which accurate reading actually bears on the claim in the text. The most tempting wrong answer is usually a true statement about the graph that has nothing to do with the claim.
This material gives twelve such questions, each with its own graph drawn from the numbers the question uses: monarch butterfly eggs at four kinds of site, home heating fuels in two survey years, traffic on a main street before and after a bypass, volunteer hours by age group, the gap between downtown and countryside night temperatures, pedestrian injuries under four speed limits, lilac bloom dates over six decades, lake clarity against farmland in a scatterplot, beaver dams after a reintroduction, hospital falls in three wards, an island's electricity sources and the newspapers of a railroad county. The scenarios are hypothetical, as they may be on the test, and every figure in the choices has been checked against its graph.
The questions cover the full range of the skill: supporting a hypothesis, weakening a claim, completing a statement with exact figures, describing data accurately and recognizing data that only partly support a prediction. They also practice the words that decide these items: each, every, lasting, widened, sped up, taken together. Each explanation names the numbers that matter, shows any calculation, and says why each wrong choice fails: a misread bar, a reversed legend, a single value where a comparison is needed, or true data about the wrong group.
The flashcards collect the method and the traps: what to read before the choices, how to test a claim's scope, how to handle two series and a legend, what a scatterplot's slope shows, and why a pattern in data is not by itself proof of cause.
Practice material written by Zestly for students preparing for the SAT; it is not produced or endorsed by the College Board.
- Read bar graphs, line graphs and scatterplots accurately, using axes, units and legends
- Choose the data that support a stated hypothesis or claim
- Choose the data that weaken a claim, including claims about every group or a lasting change
- Complete a statement with exact figures and simple calculations from a graph
- Recognize data that only partly support a prediction
- Reject accurate data that do not bear on the claim
Practice material written by Zestly, based on the Command of Evidence (Quantitative) skill of the Information and Ideas domain described in the College Board's Assessment Framework for the Digital SAT Suite (version 3.01, August 2024). All data are hypothetical.
Sample question
Ecologist Dana Whitfield counted monarch butterfly eggs on milkweed plants at four kinds of site in Iowa: roadsides, pastures, the edges of crop fields and restored prairie. She hypothesizes that female monarchs favor milkweed growing along roadsides when they lay their eggs. Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to support Whitfield's hypothesis?
- Milkweed in pastures carried 21 eggs per 100 plants, fewer than the milkweed at any other kind of site.
- Milkweed at crop edges carried 34 eggs per 100 plants, 13 more than milkweed in pastures.
- Roadside milkweed carried 58 eggs per 100 plants, more than the milkweed at any of the other three kinds of site.
- Milkweed in restored prairie carried 49 eggs per 100 plants, more than milkweed at crop edges carried.
See the answer
Roadside milkweed carried 58 eggs per 100 plants, more than the milkweed at any of the other three kinds of site.
The hypothesis is about roadsides, so the supporting data must compare roadside milkweed with the rest: 58 eggs per 100 plants, the tallest bar. The choices about restored prairie against crop edges, pastures as the lowest site, and crop edges against pastures all read the graph correctly, but none of them mentions roadsides, so none bears on the hypothesis.
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