SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 11)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 11) 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. 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?
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?
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?
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?
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?