SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 11)

Question 1. When the cellist Pablo Casals first encountered the unaccompanied Bach suites in the late nineteenth century, he refused to treat them as dry technical exercises, the way many earlier players had. He wanted audiences to hear each suite as a single coherent emotional arc rather than a loose string of separate dances strung together for practice. ______ he spent more than a decade studying the scores privately, weighing phrasing and tempo, before he was willing to perform any of them in full before a paying audience.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) In contrast,
• B) To do so, ✓
• C) In other words,
• D) Even then,

Explanation: (B) "To do so" links a stated goal -- making the audience hear a coherent arc -- to the means Casals chose to achieve it: a decade of private study. The second sentence names the aim; the blank sentence supplies the method that serves it. "In contrast" signals opposition, but the long study period does not oppose his goal; it advances it. "In other words" promises a restatement, yet a decade of study is a new fact, not a rewording of the aim. "Even then" grants a point despite some obstacle, but nothing obstructs the goal here -- the study simply pursues it.

Question 2. The pistol shrimp snaps its specialized claw so fast that the collapsing bubble it creates briefly reaches temperatures rivaling the surface of the sun, all within a burst the human ear registers only as a sharp click. That figure sounds like hyperbole until the surrounding numbers are kept in view. ______ most cavitation events studied in the laboratory produce flashes lasting only billionths of a second and carrying far less heat, which makes the shrimp's brief but powerful snap all the more striking to the researchers who measure it.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) Conversely,
• B) In the meantime,
• C) Nevertheless,
• D) After all, ✓

Explanation: (D) "After all" introduces the supporting base rate that makes the shrimp's feat believable: ordinary cavitation events are vanishingly brief, so the shrimp's stands out. The blank backs up the prior claim rather than qualifying it. "Conversely" sets up an opposite, but the lab figures point the same direction as the claim, reinforcing it. "In the meantime" marks something happening in an interval of time, yet the lab figures are offered as evidence, not as a parallel event. "Nevertheless" would signal that the typical figure works against the claim, when it actually confirms it.

Question 3. The Voynich manuscript has resisted every serious attempt at decipherment since it entered the modern record, and scholars still disagree about whether its looping script encodes a real language, an elaborate cipher, or nothing meaningful at all. What can actually be established is far more limited than the more colorful popular accounts tend to suggest; ______ the vellum has been radiocarbon-dated to the early fifteenth century, a finding that rules out several of the later forgery theories without doing anything to settle what, if anything, the text was ever meant to say.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) for example,
• B) otherwise,
• C) namely, ✓
• D) meanwhile,

Explanation: (C) "namely" delivers the specific content of the vague preceding claim. The clause before the blank says only a limited amount can be established; the blank then states exactly what that is -- the dating of the vellum. "for example" is the most tempting wrong answer here, but the dating is not one instance among many established facts; it is the single thing being specified. "otherwise" implies an alternative condition, which the passage never sets up. "meanwhile" marks a parallel event in time, yet the blank clarifies the prior sentence rather than reporting something happening alongside it.

Question 4. Historians once credited the printing press almost single-handedly with the rapid spread of Reformation pamphlets across the German lands in the early sixteenth century. ______ the press did lower the cost of reproducing a text many times over, putting cheap printed sheets within reach of more buyers than ever before. Yet recent work emphasizes that sermons read aloud in crowded markets and taverns carried the same ideas to the large share of the population that could not read at all, a channel the print-focused story long underrated.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) Admittedly, ✓
• B) In turn,
• C) As expected,
• D) Instead,

Explanation: (A) "Admittedly" concedes a point that the topic sentence's critics would grant -- the press did cut costs -- before the later "Yet" pivots to the oral channel the print story missed. The blank concedes a point, and the later "Yet" carries the real turn. "In turn" marks the next link in a chain of effects, but the blank grants ground rather than carrying a sequence forward. "As expected" marks an outcome that follows predictably, yet the cost-cutting is a concession set against the later turn, not a fulfilled prediction. "Instead" substitutes one claim for another, but the press's cost-cutting is conceded as true, not rejected.

Question 5. When Katherine Johnson joined the research group that would become NASA in 1953, her hand calculations were checked, rechecked, and often quietly folded into reports issued under other people's names. Her trajectory work for the 1962 orbital flight was trusted enough that the astronaut asked specifically for her to confirm the figures the new electronic computer had produced before he would fly. ______ the agency that had once buried her careful arithmetic in unsigned footnotes dedicated one of its research buildings in her honor, her name now fixed to the institution itself.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) In contrast,
• B) That is,
• C) Therefore,
• D) In time, ✓

Explanation: (D) "In time" closes a long arc: from anonymous footnotes, to a named request, to a building bearing her name. The blank marks the final stage of a sequence that unfolds across years. "In contrast" sets up opposition, but the honor is the culmination of the rising recognition, not a reversal of it. "That is" promises a restatement, yet the naming is a new and later event, not a rewording of the prior sentence. "Therefore" claims a tidy cause-and-effect; the recognition grew gradually rather than following as a direct logical result of the 1962 request.