SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 19)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 19) 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. Travelers crossing a vast salt flat high in the Andes often take its pale white crust for a lifeless desert, since almost nothing visibly grows on the cracked, glaring surface that stretches unbroken to the horizon in every direction; ______ the thin sheet of brine pooled just beneath that crust supports dense mats of microbes and feeds the flocks of flamingos that filter tiny organisms from the shallows, so the apparent emptiness conceals a surprisingly active food web hidden just out of sight.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The glassblowers of Murano discovered that the colors in their finest work depended on tiny amounts of metal stirred into the molten batch, and that even a trace of the wrong element could turn a clear gather cloudy or dull the brightest red. The recipes were closely guarded and ruinously easy to spoil, and the furnaces themselves posed a grave fire risk in crowded Venice; ______ the authorities moved glassmaking onto a single lagoon island, where the work could be watched and the secret formulas kept well clear of rival workshops on the mainland.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The mathematician Emmy Noether reshaped how physicists understand conservation laws, showing that they are not a scattered collection of lucky accidents but direct consequences of underlying symmetries in the equations themselves. ______ wherever the laws of a physical system stay the same under some continuous change, a matching quantity is preserved: shift the clock forward and energy holds steady; rotate the apparatus in space and angular momentum holds, each separate pairing following neatly and inevitably from her one underlying theorem about symmetry and the conserved quantities it predicts.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. The painter Bridget Riley built her early canvases entirely in black and white, arranging stripes and nested curves so precisely that the flat surface seemed to ripple, shimmer, and pulse before a viewer's eyes. ______ the optical effects were genuinely powerful, dazzling the crowds who stood transfixed before them in the gallery. But Riley always insisted the work was about the act of perception itself, not a clever bag of tricks, and she resented seeing her paintings dismissed as mere illusions.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Before engraving a finished map, an eighteenth-century cartographer first sketched coastlines and rivers in soft pencil, copying carefully from the surveyors' rough field notes. He then inked over only the lines he fully trusted, leaving doubtful stretches deliberately faint or wholly blank. ______ he cut the completed drawing in reverse into a polished copper plate, a slow and exacting step that fixed every choice permanently, since a wrong stroke gouged into metal could never be lifted out the way a pencil line could.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?