SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 10)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 10) 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. Honeybees regulate the temperature of their crowded hive with remarkable care, clustering tightly to generate warmth in winter and fanning their wings in unison to drive out excess heat in summer. The developing brood at the center can be killed by temperature swings of just a few degrees, so the colony simply cannot afford to let the interior drift. ______ a hive deprived of enough healthy workers to manage the airflow may overheat on a single hot afternoon, and an entire generation of young bees can be lost in the course of one day.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The mathematician Emmy Noether published results so foundational that whole branches of modern physics now rest squarely upon them, yet for years she was forced to lecture under a male colleague's name because her university flatly refused to grant her a paid academic position. ______ her influence spread quickly and widely through the devoted circle of students who gathered around her, carrying her ideas into journals and lecture halls across Europe long before any official title finally acknowledged what she had already done.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The deep ocean was long imagined as a still, lifeless void, far too dark and cold for much of anything to endure. Crewed submersible expeditions have steadily dismantled that grim picture, filming dense communities clustered around hot seafloor vents and strange creatures drifting through the open water at nearly every depth surveyed. ______ sensitive sensors lowered into the deepest trenches have recorded not silence but a steady traffic of sound, from the calls of distant whales to the low groan of the seabed itself shifting far below the surface.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Seed banks that store crop varieties for the distant future face a quiet, persistent threat: even deeply frozen seeds slowly lose their ability to sprout, so a sample sealed away and forgotten for too long may be dead when it is finally needed. The curators cannot simply lock the vault and walk away for good. ______ they periodically thaw small batches, grow them out in test plots, and harvest fresh seed, refilling each stock with living material before the stored generation can simply die in the cold.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The painter J. M. W. Turner grew so fascinated by atmosphere that in his late works the solid subjects of a scene -- ships, bridges, distant mountains -- dissolve into shimmering veils of light and weather, barely separable from the sky around them. Standing before such a canvas, a viewer often cannot say where the gray water ends and the rising mist begins. ______ Turner had stopped painting objects sitting in the air and begun painting the moving air itself, treating light and vapor as the true subject of the picture.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?