SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 26)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 26) 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. Early radio listeners often assumed that a louder signal must be a clearer one, and the companies selling receivers competed to advertise sheer volume above almost everything else. ______ a powerful signal could come through thick with static, swamping the very words it carried under a steady wash of hiss and crackle that no amount of volume could cut through. But engineers gradually learned that a quieter, cleaner circuit, one designed to reject stray noise at the source, served the ordinary listener far better than raw loudness ever had.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Histories of the printing press sometimes say flatly that Gutenberg invented movable type, a convenient shorthand that can leave readers with quite the wrong impression of what happened. ______ movable type made from separate clay and then metal characters had already been in use across East Asia for centuries before his German workshop ever opened its doors. What Gutenberg actually devised was a practical European system that united a durable metal-casting method, a fresh oil-based ink, and a press adapted from winemaking into one smoothly working whole.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. On paper, a public bike-share system looks pleasingly self-balancing: riders take bikes from full docks and return them to empty ones, so the stations ought to even out on their own over the course of an ordinary day; ______ the bikes pile up downhill and near the busiest transit stops every single morning, leaving the uphill stations stripped completely bare, and so the operators must load racks of bikes onto trucks and haul them back uphill by hand to keep the bike network usable at all.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. By the 1850s the navigator's marine chronometer had become a thoroughly trusted shipboard instrument, accurate enough that a careful captain could fix his longitude with real confidence even far from any charted coast. ______ for many generations sailors had often had to rely heavily on dead reckoning, patiently tallying their speed and heading hour by hour on a slate and accepting errors that could place a ship many miles from where its anxious crew firmly believed it to be, with no easy, dependable way to check the guess until landfall.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. When researchers began to doubt whether a celebrated old painting was truly the work of the master to whom it had long been attributed, they first noted that the brushwork in the crowded background was looser and less assured than his confident signature style. ______ an X-ray of the wooden panel revealed a second, abandoned composition hidden beneath the surface, one that matched a known apprentice's documented working habits rather than the master's own, pointing the evidence toward the workshop instead of the man himself.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?