SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 9)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 9) 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 a desert receives one of its rare heavy rains, seeds that have lain dormant in the ground for years germinate within days, racing to flower and set seed before the precious moisture disappears. The plants compress an entire life cycle into a few short weeks of bloom. ______ certain desert shrimp hatch from tough eggs that survive long droughts buried in the dry, cracked mud, springing suddenly to life when a temporary pool forms and completing their whole breeding cycle before the shallow water evaporates again beneath the sun.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Maps from the age of sail often show a vast southern continent sprawling across the bottom of the world, drawn with confident, unbroken coastlines and inviting natural harbors. One might reasonably assume that such precise detail rested on direct observation by sailors who had actually landed there. ______ no navigator had seen the place at all; geographers had simply reasoned that a great southern landmass must exist to balance the known continents of the north, then sketched its shores from theory rather than from any recorded voyage.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Studies of how people actually read on screens have found that very long lines of text tire the eye, which must jump back across a wide blank gap to find the start of each new line and often loses its place somewhere along the way. Shorter measures let the eye return cleanly to the margin, sustaining a reader's focus over many pages. ______ many digital publications now set their body text in deliberately narrow columns, leaving wide empty margins that a print designer of an earlier era might once have rushed to fill.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. The Antikythera mechanism, recovered by sponge divers from a Roman-era shipwreck, has astonished historians because it models the motions of the heavens with a precision that few expected from a device of its great age. Its corroded bronze gears do not merely turn at a steady rate; they reproduce subtle irregularities in the moon's path across the night sky. ______ one clever train of gears speeds and slows the moon's modeled motion to mirror the way it actually races and lingers, a refinement that would not reappear in European clockwork for many centuries.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. A new volcanic island first rises from the sea as bare, sterile rock, far too hostile and exposed for most forms of life to gain any foothold. Windblown spores settle onto it first, and hardy pioneering lichens slowly begin to break the bare stone into a thin soil that can hold a little moisture. Ferns and low shrubs then take root in that soil, and seabirds arriving from older islands drop seeds in their wake; ______ a green forest may cloak slopes that began as nothing but cooling, lifeless lava.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?