SAT R&W 72: Inference vs Outside Knowledge — Staying Inside the 60 Words

The rivers feeding a large inland sea were diverted for irrigation, and the sea shrank over the following decades. A dam later separated its northern basin from its southern one. The northern basin, no longer draining southward, began to refill, and fish returned to it within a few years; the southern basin continued to dry. Since neither basin received more river water than before, the northern recovery indicates that

A ninth-century scholar's treatise on calculation describes a system of ten symbols, including one for nothing, and explains how any quantity may be written with them. The treatise survives only in Latin translations made three centuries later. Those translations disagree with one another about several passages, and in each case where they disagree, at least one of them uses a term that had no equivalent in the language of the original. This pattern suggests that the disagreements

A caravanserai excavated on a trade route contains stabling for about forty animals and sleeping space for roughly the same number of people. Its storerooms, however, could hold several times the goods that forty animals could carry in one journey. The building stands a day's travel from the next such site in either direction. The layout suggests that the caravanserai

Honeybee colonies across a region declined sharply over five years. Beekeepers reported the same rate of loss whether their hives stood beside orchards, beside grain fields, or in woodland with no farming within several kilometres. Within each of those settings some apiaries lost most of their colonies while others lost almost none, and the difference followed which beekeeper managed them rather than where the hives stood. The pattern suggests that the main cause of the losses