SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 16)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 16) 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 physicist Chien-Shiung Wu designed her 1956 experiment on beta decay, she first cooled cobalt-60 atoms to temperatures near absolute zero so that their nuclei could be lined up by a magnetic field. She then recorded the directions in which the emitted electrons flew away from the sample; ______ she compared those counts and found that the electrons favored one direction over its mirror image, a lopsided result suggesting that a symmetry many physicists had long assumed did not hold after all.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Studying the crumbling sea cliffs of southern England, the fossil collector Mary Anning noticed that certain stony lumps, then sold to tourists as curiosities, held the same crushed fish scales and small bones she kept finding inside the bellies of ichthyosaur skeletons. She reasoned that the lumps were fossilized dung rather than ordinary pebbles; ______ she began carefully slicing them open and studying the contents, reading the diets of marine reptiles that had swum and died many millions of years before her.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The choreographer Katherine Dunham trained as an anthropologist before she founded her dance company, and audiences sometimes treated her staged works as faithful records of the Caribbean rituals she had studied in the field. ______ the performances did draw real steps and rhythms from those communities, lending the stage scenes a measure of authenticity. Yet Dunham freely reshaped the material for the proscenium, compressing long ceremonies into tight theatrical numbers that served her own artistic ends rather than any documentary purpose she might have claimed.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. The bristlecone pine called Methuselah, growing high on a windswept slope in California's White Mountains, has been dated by its growth rings to roughly forty-eight centuries, old enough to predate much of recorded history. That figure impresses chiefly when it is set beside the ordinary run of trees. ______ the oaks and maples of a temperate forest seldom pass three or four hundred years before disease, drought, or storms bring them down, so the pine has outlasted those common trees more than ten times over.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. A Roman engineer laying out an aqueduct had to hold a steady downhill grade across many miles of country so that the water would flow smoothly without pooling in the channel or racing too fast and overtopping its sides. Surveyors first checked the slope with a chorobates, a long leveling bench fitted with plumb lines and a shallow water trough. ______ where the route had to run underground, they cut vertical shafts down to the planned tunnel line, giving the crews access and letting engineers check the grade before the channel was sealed away for good.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?