SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 8)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 8) 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. The historian Marc Bloch warned that documents do not simply speak for themselves; a record survives down to us only because someone once chose to make it and someone else later chose to keep it safe. ______ every archive quietly reflects the priorities of the people who built it, carefully preserving certain transactions while letting countless others vanish unrecorded. A historian who forgets this, Bloch argued, mistakes the gaps in the surviving evidence for gaps in the past itself, reading mere silence as proof that nothing of importance ever happened.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Early radio astronomers faced a frustrating problem: the large dishes they used could detect a faint cosmic signal but could not say precisely where in the sky that signal had come from. ______ a single dish gathers real information, certainly enough to confirm that some source exists out there. Yet pinpointing that source to a sharp location demands several dishes spread miles apart and combined into one vast instrument, a technique that gradually turned a blurry, featureless glow into a precise map of distinct objects.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The translator Constance Garnett worked at such remarkable speed that she completed dozens of thick Russian novels in the years she was active, despite failing eyesight that forced her to dictate much of the work aloud. That sheer pace let her put Tolstoy and Dostoevsky into English faster than any rival, shaping how whole generations first met those authors. ______ The same haste meant that when she reached a word she could not readily parse, she sometimes skipped it entirely, leaving small silences that later translators would spend decades arguing over.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Conservators restoring a centuries-old fresco often find that earlier repair campaigns did more lasting damage than the passing centuries ever did, coating the original pigments in thick varnishes and clumsy overpaint that only darkened further with age. Removing these added layers is delicate work, and a single misjudged solvent can lift flecks of original paint along with the later additions. ______ the team presses carefully on, since leaving the disfiguring layers in place would let the very colors they aim to rescue keep fading slowly from view.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The architect Denise Scott Brown argued that planners should study ordinary streets and roadside signs rather than dismiss them as mere visual clutter, insisting that everyday commercial buildings carried lessons the grand civic monuments simply could not. She spent years patiently documenting the cluttered commercial strips that most of her professional peers drove past without a second glance. ______ the studio she led became widely known for sending its students out with cameras to record the very landscapes the profession had long been trained to ignore.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?