SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 6)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 6) is a Reading & Writing practice drill covering Hard Transitions. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

Hard SAT Transitions questions ask you to choose the word or phrase that captures the exact logical relationship between ideas. The answer is rarely the most familiar connector; difficulty comes from three distractors that each fit a different, plausible relationship, with only one matching what the passage actually does.

Questions in This Drill

1. When the printmaker Mary Cassatt began exhibiting with the French Impressionists in 1879, many American critics largely ignored her, treating her work as a curiosity rather than serious art. Their indifference held for years as she kept working abroad. ______ collectors in her home country began acquiring those same works, and museums that had once passed her over competed to secure examples for their walls. The slow turnaround owed less to any change in the work itself than to a gradual reappraisal of who counted as an American master.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Tide-predicting machines built in the late nineteenth century used cranks and pulleys to sum the many cycles that drive the tides, and their printed forecasts guided ships in and out of busy harbors for decades. ______ these brass calculators were marvels of engineering, embodying a deep practical grasp of the underlying mathematics. Still, they could only reproduce patterns their makers had already measured by hand; a tide shaped by an unrecorded current or storm lay entirely beyond their reach, a limit that no amount of careful gearing could ever undo.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The botanist Agnes Arber argued that a plant's form could be understood only by watching how its parts unfold over a whole season, not by cataloguing a single mature specimen pressed flat in a collection. Her unusual training in both laboratory science and philosophy let her frame questions that purely descriptive botanists of her day rarely thought to ask. ______ her fluency in German and Latin gave her direct access to centuries of earlier plant studies, letting her trace ideas back to their sources that many colleagues knew only through partial, secondhand summaries.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Visitors to the Lascaux caves often assume the famous animal paintings were made by people who lived deep underground, sheltering for years in the painted chambers themselves. The archaeological evidence points elsewhere. Hearths, scattered tools, and food remains cluster near the cave mouths and at open-air sites in the surrounding valley. ______ the deep painted galleries hold almost no sign of ordinary daily life, suggesting the decorated halls were visited only for specific occasions and then left dark and empty for long stretches in between.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The engineer Hertha Ayrton spent years studying the hissing electric arc lamps that lit the streets and theaters of her day, and she showed that the irritating noise was not random but tied to a single specific flaw in how the lamps burned. ______ the hiss arose when oxygen reached the heated tip of the carbon rod and pitted its surface, breaking the smooth flow of current across the gap. Once she had identified that cause, redesigning the rod to shield its tip became a straightforward engineering problem rather than a baffling mystery.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?