SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 18)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 18) 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 crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin worked out the three-dimensional structure of penicillin in the 1940s, reading the positions of its atoms from the faint patterns its crystals scattered across an X-ray film. The achievement alone would have secured her reputation among chemists; ______ she went on to map the far larger and more tangled structure of vitamin B12, a molecule so intricate that the calculations strained the early computers she enlisted, painstaking work that helped earn her a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The sculptor Ruth Asawa wanted her hanging wire forms to seem almost weightless, as if a single shape could hold open a pocket of space without ever quite enclosing it behind a solid wall. ______ she looped one continuous strand of wire into nested, transparent volumes, so that an inner form seemed to float inside an outer one and the eye passed straight through both at once, reading solid mass and empty air together as a single woven gesture that seemed to weigh almost nothing at all.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Studying how a soap film stretches itself into the smallest possible surface across a bent wire frame, the architect Frei Otto saw a rule he could borrow for buildings: nature tends to settle on shapes that span a given area with the least material. ______ he shaped tent-like roofs whose curved fabric pulled taut between slender masts and steel cables, covering wide public halls with a thin skin far lighter than any poured slab of concrete could ever have managed across the same open span.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. To chart a stretch of seafloor in the days before sonar, a survey ship lowered a weighted rope over the side until it touched bottom, then noted the depth marked off at that single spot. The vessel steamed a fixed distance and dropped the line once more, repeating the slow cast mile after mile across open water; ______ the crew joined the scattered soundings into one continuous profile, tracing the rise and fall of ridges and trenches that no one had ever seen directly and that the charts had until then left blank.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The motion-detecting cells in a fly's eye can react to a flicker of light and recover quickly enough to register many separate changes within the span of a single human blink. That speed seems exotic only when it is held up against our own slower vision. ______ the human eye blends light flashing past more than a few tens of times each second into a single steady glow, a threshold low enough to make the fly's rapid flicker-fusion look genuinely extreme rather than merely quick.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?