SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 28)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 28) 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. A baker working with a live sourdough starter has to feed it on a fairly regular schedule, discarding part of the culture each time and mixing in fresh flour and water so that the resident yeast and bacteria always have something to live on; ______ the hungry microbes slowly exhaust their food supply, grow sour and sluggish in the jar, and lose the lively lift that makes a loaf rise, until the starter itself has to be coaxed patiently back to strength or simply begun again from scratch.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. People like to picture scientific breakthroughs arriving in a single flash of insight, one brilliant mind suddenly seeing clearly what no one had managed to see before. Sometimes discovery really does work that way. ______ it comes instead from long years of patient laboratory work, or from a dozen separate research groups around the world inching toward the very same result at almost the same time, so that the eventual public credit could just as easily have landed on any one of several rival teams.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. When the first public coffeehouses opened their doors in seventeenth-century London, they were treated mainly as passing novelties, places to sample a strange bitter drink that very few people in the city had ever tasted before. ______ they had become something far more useful: busy rooms where merchants traded the latest news, writers argued politics late into the evening, and shippers struck deals over the day's arrivals, so that a single coffeehouse might double as a newsroom and a trading floor at once.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. A lighthouse keeper's nightly job was never only a matter of lighting the great lamp at dusk and leaving it to burn. The heavy glass lens had to be polished free of soot and salt each morning so the beam would carry cleanly out to sea; ______ the clockwork that slowly rotated the light had to be wound and watched right through the night, since a flash that quietly stopped turning could be mistaken for some other light and lure a trusting ship toward the very rocks the tower was meant to warn it away from.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. A salt marsh lying between the open sea and the low coastal fields does quiet but vital work during a storm. Its dense, matted grasses and spongy peat soak up the surging water and slow it down, then drain it away gradually over the long hours that follow rather than letting it slam ashore all at once. ______ the marsh behaves as a kind of buffer, absorbing the first heavy blow of the sea so that the farmland lying behind it never has to take that blow directly.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?