SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 13)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 13) 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. Barbara McClintock's painstaking work on maize in the 1940s revealed that genes are not always fixed in a single place along a chromosome, as the textbooks of her day assumed. Watching kernel after kernel, she found that certain segments could move from one position to another, switching nearby genes on and off and visibly altering the color patterns that appeared. ______ heredity was not the rigid sequence of immovable units that the genetics of the period took for granted, but something far more mobile, flexible, and responsive than anyone had pictured.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. For most of the nineteenth century, a navigator fixed a ship's longitude with a delicate marine chronometer that had to be wound on schedule, shielded from every temperature swing, and constantly compared against careful star sightings to catch any drift. A single jolt or a missed winding could throw off a reckoning by miles. ______ a vessel at sea could check its clocks against a precise time signal broadcast by radio from a shore station, and the old dependence on one fragile, easily disturbed instrument slowly began to fade.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The teacher Nadia Boulanger believed a young composer could not write convincingly until she could hear an entire score in her head, every line and harmony, without touching an instrument. She wanted her students to internalize harmony so completely that the printed page would become almost unnecessary to them, a mere record of what they already heard inside. ______ she drilled them in sight-singing and figured bass for hours on end, often making them work out a passage in the mind before confirming the sound at the keyboard.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Testing the metal alloys used in early aircraft, engineers discovered that a part could survive thousands of perfectly safe loadings and then fail with almost no warning, undone by fatigue cracks too fine to see during a routine inspection. A wing spar that passed every static strength test on the ground might still tear apart in the air after enough flights had quietly weakened it. ______ inspectors adopted fixed service lifetimes, retiring critical components on a set schedule rather than waiting for a visible flaw that might appear only too late.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Critics have long dismissed the medieval astrolabe as a charming curiosity, a brass toy soon left behind by sharper and more specialized instruments; ______ the device could not match a modern sextant for raw accuracy when a navigator needed one precise reading. Still, a single astrolabe could tell the time of day, find a latitude, and model the turning of the visible sky all at once, a versatility that very few of the later tools matched in one small, portable object a traveler could hang from a thumb.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?