SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 29)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 29) 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 first mechanical clocks installed high in medieval town towers were, by any modern measure, badly inaccurate machines, drifting by many minutes across a single day and needing constant correction against the noon sun to mean anything at all; ______ they changed the texture of daily life profoundly, ringing out the hours for work, prayer, and the opening of markets, and gradually teaching whole towns to organize the working day around one shared public signal rather than the loose, uneven rhythm of daylight alone.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. When electronic calculators became genuinely cheap in the 1970s, many confident observers predicted that the humble abacus would vanish within a single generation, a quaint relic with no real place in a world of batteries and silicon chips. ______ skilled users across several countries still reach for the sliding beads, and well-trained children can rival a calculator on certain kinds of sums, partly because working an abacus by hand builds an intuitive feel for number that tapping a plastic keypad simply does not.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Each time a great river floods a wide valley, it spreads a thin layer of fine silt across the low fields and then slowly withdraws, leaving the soil noticeably richer than it had been before. Farmers along such rivers have for ages planted directly in the wake of the retreating water. ______ the entire cycle turns again the following season: the river swells and rises, the valley floods and then drains, and a fresh coat of fertile mud is laid down for the next round of planting.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Some hardy desert plants survive the long drought by storing water in thick, fleshy stems and leaves that they draw on slowly through the rainless months. Arid-country plants, ______ take the opposite approach altogether, staying small, shedding their leaves, or simply waiting out the worst of the dry season as dormant seeds, since hoarding water is both costly and dangerous in a place where a thirsty animal may tear a swollen stem wide open to reach the moisture stored inside it.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Restoring the small wooden sailing ship took far longer than anyone involved had first guessed. The cracked hull needed two hundred new oak planks, each cut and steamed and bent carefully to shape; the rigging called for miles of fresh rope laid up by hand; the deck fittings, long since rusted away to nothing, had to be forged one by one to the old patterns. ______ the work stretched to nearly four years and drew on the skills of shipwrights, smiths, and sailmakers who had to relearn half-forgotten trades as they went.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?