SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 12)

Question 1. Popular histories often picture the printmaker Hokusai producing his famous image of a great wave as a young prodigy working at the first peak of an early career, the natural opening act of a long life in art. The dating tells a markedly different story; ______ he made the print in his early seventies, decades into a restless practice during which he had reinvented his style repeatedly and changed his professional name many times over. The wave belongs to late experiment, not to youthful arrival.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) similarly,
• B) therefore,
• C) actually, ✓
• D) for instance,

Explanation: (C) "actually" corrects the popular picture: not a prodigy's early triumph but the work of a man in his seventies. The blank replaces the assumed version with the documented one. "similarly" claims the second sentence matches the first, but it overturns the first rather than echoing it. "therefore" draws a consequence, yet the late dating is not an effect of the popular belief; it contradicts it. "for instance" offers an example of the popular claim, when the sentence instead refutes that claim.

Question 2. Surveying coastal Louisiana in the early twentieth century, engineers documented how quickly the leveed Mississippi was starving its own delta of the sediment that normally builds new land. Walled off for the sake of navigation, the river carried its load of mud straight out and dumped it into deep water offshore instead of spreading it across the shallow marshes each spring. ______ restoration engineers have proposed building controlled openings into the levee system, letting carefully managed flows rebuild stretches of wetland that the old engineering had effectively drowned.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) In response, ✓
• B) Even so,
• C) Similarly,
• D) Until then,

Explanation: (A) "In response" ties a documented problem -- a sediment-starved delta -- to the action it provoked: engineers proposing controlled openings to restore the marshes. The proposal arises because of the finding. "Even so" would signal the proposal moves ahead despite the finding, but it follows directly from it. "Similarly" claims a parallel between the diagnosis and the fix, yet one is a problem and the other its remedy. "Until then" marks a time boundary before some change, which misreads the causal link as merely a sequence.

Question 3. The mathematician Emmy Noether reshaped abstract algebra so thoroughly that colleagues described themselves as working for years inside the conceptual world she had built for them. Her 1918 theorem linking continuous symmetries to conservation laws became foundational to modern theoretical physics, cited steadily by later generations who never met her. ______ the many students she trained and mentored carried her distinctive methods into universities across two continents, extending an influence that her brief and repeatedly obstructed academic career might never have seemed likely to produce.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) Instead,
• B) Besides this, ✓
• C) As a result,
• D) In short,

Explanation: (B) "Besides this" adds a second strand of influence -- her students' reach -- on top of the theorem already named, stacking two distinct measures of her impact. The blank intensifies rather than concludes. "Instead" substitutes one claim for another, but the students' work supplements the theorem rather than replacing it. "As a result" reads the students' reach as an effect of the theorem, yet the two are parallel kinds of influence, not cause and effect. "In short" promises a summary, but a new fact is being introduced, not a wrap-up of what came before.

Question 4. The architect Frei Otto designed his roofs by hanging chains and stretching soap films, then letting physical forces settle into the most efficient shape on their own before he scaled the result up into a building. He distrusted forms imposed from a drawing board, preferring structures that seemed to grow directly out of the loads they would have to carry. ______ the airy, lightweight tented roof he helped develop for the 1972 Munich Games looked less like something built than something discovered, its sweeping curves following lines of tension rather than any designer's passing whim.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) However,
• B) By contrast,
• C) In particular,
• D) Suitably, ✓

Explanation: (D) "Suitably" marks the Munich roof as the apt expression of Otto's stated method: a form that looks discovered rather than imposed. The outcome fits the principle the passage just laid out. "However" signals a reversal, but the stadium confirms his philosophy rather than departing from it. "By contrast" sets the roof against his method, when it actually embodies that method. "In particular" narrows to a detail of a broader claim, yet the sentence presents the stadium as a fitting result, not a sub-point of the prior statement.

Question 5. The deep-sea anglerfish's glowing lure, dangled in front of its jaws to draw curious prey through the lightless water, is often described as the fish's own ingenious invention, a hunting lamp grown for the purpose. The light, ______, is not produced by the anglerfish at all but by dense colonies of bacteria it houses inside the lure, microbes that it feeds and shelters in steady return for their reliable glow. The fearsome predator borrows its single most famous trait from organisms far smaller than itself.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) for one thing,
• B) in turn,
• C) as it happens, ✓
• D) by comparison,

Explanation: (C) "as it happens" sets aside the common description -- the fish's own invention -- for the truer account: the glow comes from resident bacteria. The interrupting blank corrects the framing mid-sentence. "for one thing" begins to list reasons, but the sentence corrects a claim rather than enumerating support. "in turn" marks a step in a sequence or exchange, yet here the point is correction, not consequence. "by comparison" invites a side-by-side, when nothing is being measured against anything else.