SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 1)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 1) 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. Hydrothermal vents form where cold seawater seeps down through cracks in the ocean floor, is superheated by magma in the crust below, and surges back upward carrying dissolved chemicals and minerals that support entire communities of specialized organisms. The cluster of vents that oceanographers explored along one stretch of the Mariana back-arc in 2015 is remarkable for its depth, with openings sitting nearly 4,000 meters below the surface; ______ many documented hydrothermal vents lie at depths closer to 2,000 to 2,500 meters.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. As one of the last people who could still speak Wukchumni fluently, the Wukchumni elder Marie Wilcox resolved to preserve the language of her childhood in the San Joaquin Valley so that future learners would not lose it. ______ over the course of more than two decades she taught herself to type, compiled a comprehensive dictionary one entry at a time, and helped record each word in her own voice, so that learners who never heard the language spoken at home could still study its correct pronunciation.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The muralist Diego Rivera is celebrated for grounding his enormous public works in the visual traditions of Mexico's Indigenous peoples, filling the walls of palaces and public buildings with pre-Columbian motifs and sweeping scenes of everyday Mexican life. ______ he spent formative years studying in Europe, where he absorbed the techniques of the Italian fresco painters and moved among the Cubists of the Parisian avant-garde. Still, much of the bold imagery he is remembered for draws unmistakably on the art of the Americas.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Researchers studying arid watersheds across the American West have documented that the dams built by beavers raise the local water table, slow the rush of spring snowmelt, and keep streams flowing later into the dry season, buffering the surrounding land against drought and wildfire. ______ some state and federal land-management agencies have begun capturing beavers and relocating them into degraded creeks to rebuild wetlands, marking a shift away from longstanding policies that often treated the animals chiefly as nuisances to be removed.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Archaeologists studying a set of ancient stone tools recovered from a hillside quarry initially proposed that the smooth, glossy surface of the blades was produced by deliberate polishing, which they took as evidence of a sophisticated finishing technique otherwise unknown in the region during that period. ______ a later microscopic analysis of the tools revealed networks of fine scratches consistent with those left by long tumbling in a fast-moving riverbed, suggesting that the distinctive sheen had formed through natural processes rather than human craft.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?