SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 22)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 22) 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 choreographer Martha Graham first built her early solos, some critics described the angular, sharply contracted movements as cold and withholding, more anatomical diagram than dance; ______ many audiences returning to those very same works found them charged with feeling once they stopped expecting the long, flowing lines of classical ballet. The vocabulary that had at first looked severe came to read, for a great many viewers, as a remarkably direct way of putting inner states onto the open stage.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Astronomers had long known that some stars brighten and dim again on a regular schedule, but Henrietta Leavitt noticed something far more useful in one particular class of them. ______ she found that the time a Cepheid variable takes to complete a single cycle is tied to its true brightness, so that its period quietly reveals how luminous the star really is. That relationship handed observers a long-sought way to gauge the vast distances to the faint star fields where such variables appear.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Bell founders pouring large bronze bells learned that the exact pitch could never be tuned reliably while the metal was still molten, since the final tone depended on the cooled casting's thickness and overall shape. ______ they cast each bell slightly thick on purpose, leaving themselves a margin of metal to work with. Once the casting had set hard, they carefully shaved metal from the inside on a lathe, lowering the note by tiny amounts until the bell at last rang exactly true.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. The naturalist illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian traveled to Suriname to draw tropical insects directly from life, and a few of the strange metamorphoses she recorded were later questioned by specialists who could not readily reproduce them. ______ a number of her observations of which caterpillars fed on which particular plants did look unusual for her time. Still, modern entomologists have since confirmed many of those pairings, and her plates are now read as early field ecology rather than as mere decoration.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. A suspension bridge carries its long roadway on cables that hang in a gentle curve, and the tall towers feel that load mainly as a downward push they can pass straight into the bedrock below. ______ a stone arch turns the weight resting above it into a squeeze that runs along the curve and out to the solid supports at each end. Both forms work by guiding force into shapes that the chosen material can comfortably bear in either compression or tension.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?