SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 17)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 17) 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 codebreakers at Bletchley Park faced a cipher whose machine settings were reset every single day, so any approach that demanded weeks of patient hand calculation was hopeless against it. The bombe, an electromechanical device that searched through possible rotor positions far faster than any person could, narrowed the field in a matter of hours. ______ the design answered the very pressure the cryptanalysts faced: a problem that reset itself each midnight had at last met a tool quick enough to keep pace with it.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. When the self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan sent pages of formulas to Cambridge, the results arrived with almost no proofs attached, just bold assertions about infinite series, continued fractions, and the ways whole numbers can be split into sums. ______ a great many of the results were correct, as later mathematicians confirmed one by one. But the absence of any derivations troubled his first readers, who could not yet see how he had reached conclusions that seemed to come from nowhere and took years of labor to justify.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Restoring a faded daguerreotype, a conservator first photographs the silver plate under raking light to map exactly where the image has tarnished into a haze. She then tests one small corner with a mild chemical bath, watching whether the corrosion lifts without scouring the fragile picture beneath; ______ she treats the whole surface, working in short passes and rinsing often, so that a century of darkening clears away without erasing the delicate portrait that the tarnish had nearly swallowed and left almost invisible beneath the clouded silver.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. The astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar wanted to know what becomes of a star once it has burned through its fuel and can no longer hold itself up against the inward pull of its own gravity. ______ he combined the new quantum rules governing dense matter with Einstein's account of mass and energy, working through the equations during a long sea voyage to England and calculating a limit above which a stellar remnant cannot remain a stable white dwarf but must undergo some form of further collapse instead.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. A single bolt of lightning can heat the narrow channel of air it carves to something like thirty thousand kelvin, several times hotter than the visible surface of the Sun itself. That figure sounds almost impossible until it is placed beside the flames of everyday life. ______ a candle or an open wood fire burns at little more than one or two thousand kelvin, a range so far beneath the bolt that the stroke's brief, searing temperature stands clearly in a class of its own.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?