SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 20)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 20) 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 pianist and composer Clara Schumann became famous across Europe as one of the great performers of her age, a reputation that could easily make her own compositions seem secondary to the celebrated works audiences flocked to the concert hall to hear. ______ early in her career she sometimes placed a piece of her own beside the showpieces and sonatas on a printed program, letting a hall that had arrived for familiar repertoire also encounter, if only briefly, music she herself had written.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Early builders who tried to roof a wide room in stone ran into a stubborn limit: a flat stone beam cracks through the middle once it grows long, because stone resists being squeezed far better than it resists being stretched apart; ______ as the beam lengthens, its mounting weight bears down ever harder on the walls and columns beneath it, so a simple flat slab could bridge only a narrow gap before some arched or trussed form of roofing became unavoidable for anything wider.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The textile artist Anni Albers found that weaving forced every idea through a strict grid, since a thread could only ever pass over or under another and never blur softly between the two. Rather than chafe against that hard rule, she chose to treat it as the very source of her designs; ______ her woven pictures grew directly out of the loom's own logic, their patterns assembled from the simple over-under binary the threads allowed and never from anything the structure plainly forbade.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. When swallows gather by the hundreds on telephone wires and then wheel away together south in autumn, it is easy to imagine that a sudden snap of cold weather is what drives them off. The birds do indeed leave as the season turns chilly. ______ careful study has shown that shortening daylight sets the broad seasonal schedule, even as passing weather can still nudge the exact day of departure, since the length of the day shifts on a fixed astronomical cycle that no warm or cold spell can shift.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. A single grain of volcanic glass can record how fast it once cooled, since slow cooling gives crystals time to grow within the melt while a sudden chill freezes it smooth and clear before any can form. Some obsidian cooled so quickly, against the chilled edge of a flow or in cold water, that it holds no crystals at all. ______ lava that oozes out and cools over days or weeks fills with countless tiny mineral grains, a common texture that makes crystal-free glass the exception.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?