SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 2)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 2) 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. Early studies of animal navigation tended to credit a single dominant cue, such as the position of the sun, the pattern of polarized light at dusk, or the pull of Earth's magnetic field, with guiding a species home across great distances. The biologist Rachel Muheim has argued that migratory songbirds instead integrate several of these cues at once, calibrating one against another and weighing celestial and magnetic information together as conditions change; ______ some earlier models treated the magnetic compass as the primary reference that governed orientation.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The composer Florence Price drew on the musical vocabulary of the African American communities she grew up among in the segregated South, weaving their idioms into the formal structures of the European symphony at a time when few orchestras would program a Black woman's work. ______ she built whole movements around the syncopated rhythms of the juba dance and the bent, sliding melodic turns of spirituals, setting these traditions inside the four-movement symphonic form that composers like Brahms had inherited and refined.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The deep-sea anglerfish lives in the lightless midwater zone where almost no sunlight reaches, and for a predator in such darkness, attracting prey toward the mouth is a far greater challenge than chasing it down. ______ in many deep-sea anglerfish species the female has evolved a luminous lure that dangles on a fleshy stalk before her jaws, a glowing beacon whose light depends on colonies of symbiotic bacteria. In the lightless deep, that small flickering spark is often enough to draw curious prey within reach of her teeth.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. When the architect Maya Lin designs a memorial, she wants visitors not merely to stand and look at a monument from a distance but to move through a space that gradually reshapes how they remember a difficult event. ______ in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial she set long walls of polished black granite below ground level, so that those who enter descend slowly along the carved names of the dead before the walls recede and the path rises again toward the open landscape, tracing a passage from loss back to the living world.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. By every conventional measure, the rookie pitcher should have struggled in his first professional season: he threw considerably more slowly than most of his peers, his repertoire of pitches was unusually narrow, and scouts had warned that hitters at this level would punish such unexceptional pitches. ______ he finished the year with one of the lowest earned-run averages in the entire league, baffling batters who somehow could not seem to time even his most ordinary deliveries until it was too late.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?