SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 25)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 25) 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. When a bombardier beetle is threatened, it does not simply flee or bite at the attacker. Inside its body two stored chemicals are pushed together into a small reinforced chamber, where they meet a catalyst and react in a sudden, violent burst. ______ the reaction flashes the mixture to near boiling and fires a hot, irritating spray out of the tip of the beetle's abdomen, aimed with surprising accuracy, so the insect drives off a much larger predator without ever closing with it directly.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. A working windmill of the old Dutch kind asked a great deal of its keeper from dawn until the wind died. The miller had to read the shifting wind and turn the whole heavy cap so the sails faced it squarely, and reef or spread the canvas as the breeze rose and fell; ______ he had to watch the grinding stones constantly, since stones run too dry could throw a single spark into the floating flour dust and set the whole mill ablaze in moments.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. By the time the astronomer Cecilia Payne was widely honored for showing that the stars are made overwhelmingly of hydrogen, her conclusion had passed from doubted to standard, cited in every textbook on the subject. ______ she had reached that result as a young researcher whose thesis senior figures pressed her to soften, and she had spent years in posts that carried little title or pay, excluded by the rules of the day from a regular professorship. The recognition that came later rested on work she had done during those quiet, unofficial years.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Maps of the night sky drawn before the telescope are sometimes treated as little more than decorative star charts, pretty patterns of myth and ornament but imprecise as records. ______ many were indeed crude by later standards, placing the fainter stars only roughly and smoothing whole regions of the sky into approximate clusters. Yet the best of them recorded the positions of bright stars carefully enough that modern astronomers can use them to date old observations and even to track tiny shifts in the stars over the centuries since.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The potter Lucie Rie wanted thrown stoneware to be received as serious modern design rather than as quaint handicraft turned out by rote from old village models; ______ she reworked the vessel from the ground up, testing how a single shift in a glaze or in the line of a rim would change the character of the whole pot and treating each such choice as a design problem to be solved. The pieces she made this way reshaped how studio pottery was judged for a generation.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?