SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 12)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 12) 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. 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?
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?
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?
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?
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?