SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 15)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 15) 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. Studying captive octopuses over several weeks, researchers noticed that the animals grew visibly restless and began methodically dismantling the fittings of their tanks when they were kept in bare, featureless enclosures with nothing to do. The behavior strongly suggested the frustration of an unusually intelligent animal with far too little to occupy its attention. ______ many public aquariums now supply their octopuses with jars to unscrew, mazes to solve, and shifting puzzles changed out regularly, all meant to keep a famously curious mind genuinely engaged.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The printer Aldus Manutius believed that books ought to travel along with their readers rather than sit chained to desks in a few great libraries. Working in Venice around the year 1500, he issued the classics in a small octavo format light enough to carry in one hand, paired with a compact italic type that packed far more words onto every page. ______ his editions helped turn reading into something a merchant or traveler could carry through an ordinary day and open whenever a spare moment allowed.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Lightning is commonly said never to strike the same place twice, a tidy bit of folk wisdom that offers a comforting sense of safety after a near miss. Tall structures expose the saying as pure folklore; ______ the spire of one famous skyscraper is struck dozens of times in a typical year, drawing those strikes precisely because its great height offers passing storms the easiest available path to the ground. Repetition, not avoidance, is the real rule for anything that stands high enough above its surroundings.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Enthusiasts often present early photography as an instant and total triumph over the older art of painted portraiture, as though the brush were rendered obsolete overnight. ______ the daguerreotype did capture a sitter's likeness with a fidelity no painter's hand could ever quite match. Yet the long exposures it required demanded an unnatural, frozen stillness, and the delicate silvered plate yielded only a single image that could not be reproduced from a negative the way later processes allowed, real limits that portrait painters never had to face at all.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Lise Meitner explained a startling result her collaborators could detect chemically but could not interpret: bombarding uranium with neutrons had somehow produced much lighter elements. Working out the physics with her nephew Otto Frisch, she showed how a uranium nucleus could divide into two smaller nuclei, releasing energy in the amount that mass-energy equivalence would predict. ______ a tiny loss of mass during the split would reappear as an enormous burst of energy, the very release that their calculation, not the original chemistry, first made sense of.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?