SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 14)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 14) 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. The choreographer Alvin Ailey built his 1960 work Revelations from the spirituals, gospel songs, and blues he had absorbed growing up in rural Texas, turning the private memories of a particular childhood into a shared public stage language. The piece has been performed almost continuously since its premiere, a fixture of his company's repertory for generations of dancers. ______ it has traveled the world with the company, becoming for countless audiences abroad their very first encounter with modern American dance and the traditions that shaped it.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The deep blue of a glacier is commonly attributed to the sky reflecting off its smooth surface, an explanation that sounds reasonable to anyone who has seen one on a clear day. The color, ______, has almost nothing to do with reflection at all. Dense glacial ice absorbs the longer, red wavelengths of sunlight and lets the shorter blue ones travel deep into the mass and scatter back out, so the striking blue rises from within the ice itself rather than from the sky above.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. A single connected colony of the fungus Armillaria in an eastern Oregon forest spreads underground across an area larger than many small towns, making it one of the largest living organisms ever measured by scientists. The claim grows easier to accept once the ordinary scale of fungi is kept firmly in view. ______ most of the mushrooms a hiker happens to notice occupy no more than a single fallen log or damp patch of soil, so the sheer reach of this buried network is exactly what sets the colony so far apart.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. The botanist Agnes Chase wanted the grasses she gathered on her long South American expeditions to remain genuinely useful to scientists for generations, not merely to fill the pages of her own field notebooks and then gather dust. She understood that a specimen stripped of precise data was nearly worthless to any later researcher trying to retrace her steps. ______ she labeled every pressing with its exact locality, soil, and elevation, then deposited the finished collections in public herbaria where any qualified worker could consult them freely.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Reading the early drafts of her novels beside the published versions reveals just how much the writer Toni Morrison was willing to cut from a finished page. She trimmed away explanation that an attentive reader could readily supply unaided, trusting silence and implication to do work that flat statement would only deaden. ______ a draft passage that once described a character's feeling directly might survive into print in a far more compressed form, the full weight of it left for the reader to feel rather than be plainly told.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?