SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 24)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 24) 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 painter Sonia Delaunay is often remembered first for her abstract canvases of overlapping, brightly colored discs that seem to spin on the surface of the picture. ______ a great deal of her working energy went into fabrics, book bindings, and stage costumes that galleries long treated as a separate, somehow lesser activity. She herself saw no such divide, designing a bolt of patterned cloth and a finished painting by the very same principles of rhythm and contrast that guided all her work.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. A house cat can hear sounds well above the upper range that a person is able to follow, catching the faint, high squeaks that mice use to communicate with one another in the dark; ______ many moths perceive frequencies higher still, their bodies finely tuned to the ultrasonic clicks of the bats that hunt them through the night air. The cat's keen ears, impressive enough beside a human's, sit only partway up a scale that some small insects climb a good deal further.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Hoping to make astronomical measurements useful beyond the observatory, the astronomer Maria Mitchell worked as a computer for the U.S. Nautical Almanac, calculating the positions of Venus so that navigators could rely on them at sea. ______ she reduced long runs of raw observation into clean, finished tables, carrying out by hand the patient, exacting arithmetic that turned scattered sightings into figures other people could simply look up. The ephemeris entries produced this way were meant to be consulted, not recomputed.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. A levada, the contour channel that carries mountain water across the steep hillsides of Madeira, moves its flow by gravity alone, so the bed must descend without pause, and yet the slope has to stay gentle enough that the current neither stalls in the flat stretches nor races fast enough to scour the lining away; ______ the builders had to lose height steadily but very slowly across the entire route. A drop of a few feet per mile, held over many miles, was the narrow target they aimed for.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Grafting a fruit tree lets a grower fix a prized variety in place, since every tree grown from that union bears fruit closely matching the parent rather than the unpredictable mix that planting seeds would yield. The method can fill an entire orchard with reliably excellent fruit. ______ that same orchard carries a quieter liability: built from one graft, it shares a single set of vulnerabilities, and a pest or blight that happens to breach one tree finds every other tree equally undefended.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?