SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 21)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 21) 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 violinmaker Antonio Stradivari was working in Cremona, his instruments earned admiration for their carrying power, and later writers often credited a secret varnish recipe that was supposedly lost to time. ______ chemical studies of the surviving instruments find little that is unusual in the finish itself. But the density and graining of the spruce he selected, shaped over many seasons of slow drying in the workshop, are among the factors researchers now weigh more heavily than any lost recipe.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Determined to map the ocean floor at a time when most charts simply marked deep water as featureless blank space, the geologist Marie Tharp set out to render the Atlantic seabed as actual terrain rather than as empty depth. ______ she translated thousands of sounding measurements into careful cross-sectional profiles, drawing ridges and valleys by hand across long sheets of paper. The mid-ocean rift she traced in those drawings would later help persuade many doubtful geologists that the seafloor was slowly spreading apart.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Histories of early aviation often present the glider experiments of Otto Lilienthal as a straightforward prelude to powered flight, a tidy first chapter to be turned before the engine finally arrives on the scene. ______ his careful records of lift and wing curvature were studied closely by later designers, who treated them as working data rather than as a quaint rehearsal. Read in that light, the experiments look less like a brief preface and more like a foundation that powered flight was actually built upon.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Studying the seeds buried in old soil layers, botanists on a meadow restoration project found that the site's original wildflowers had left a dormant seed bank still viable after decades underground; ______ the team chose not to sow any commercial seed across the ground at all. Instead they cleared away the invasive cover and simply waited through a season, letting the buried stock germinate on its own and slowly reproduce the meadow that had grown there long before the field was abandoned.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The medieval scribes who copied manuscripts in monastic workrooms did far more than reproduce text: they ruled the guidelines, mixed the inks, and prepared the parchment surface so that the letters would sit evenly within their columns. ______ many of them added marginal notes correcting errors they happened to notice in the copies they were working from, refining the texts as they went. The finished books therefore carried both the original work and a thin layer of the scribe's own editorial judgment.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?