SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 26)

Question 1. Early radio listeners often assumed that a louder signal must be a clearer one, and the companies selling receivers competed to advertise sheer volume above almost everything else. ______ a powerful signal could come through thick with static, swamping the very words it carried under a steady wash of hiss and crackle that no amount of volume could cut through. But engineers gradually learned that a quieter, cleaner circuit, one designed to reject stray noise at the source, served the ordinary listener far better than raw loudness ever had.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) In sum,
• B) Even then, ✓
• C) In the meantime,
• D) As a result,

Explanation: (B) "Even then" concedes that volume could arrive paired with static, and the following "But" pivots to the better path of a cleaner circuit; the blank grants a drawback the passage then moves past. "In sum" would summarize the volume race, but the sentence raises a complicating problem rather than condensing the prior point. "In the meantime" would mark something happening in the interval, when the sentence states a drawback of loud signals themselves. "As a result" would make the static a consequence of the advertising, which is not the link being drawn.

Question 2. Histories of the printing press sometimes say flatly that Gutenberg invented movable type, a convenient shorthand that can leave readers with quite the wrong impression of what happened. ______ movable type made from separate clay and then metal characters had already been in use across East Asia for centuries before his German workshop ever opened its doors. What Gutenberg actually devised was a practical European system that united a durable metal-casting method, a fresh oil-based ink, and a press adapted from winemaking into one smoothly working whole.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) To be clear, ✓
• B) Even so,
• C) Likewise,
• D) In return,

Explanation: (A) "To be clear" flags the correction that follows, heading off the misreading the shorthand invites by specifying what was and was not new; the blank sharpens a loose claim before it misleads. "Even so" would concede a tension and press on, but the sentence corrects the prior claim rather than yielding to it. "Likewise" would add a parallel, when the sentence instead qualifies the opening statement. "In return" would mark an exchange, which the passage never sets up.

Question 3. On paper, a public bike-share system looks pleasingly self-balancing: riders take bikes from full docks and return them to empty ones, so the stations ought to even out on their own over the course of an ordinary day; ______ the bikes pile up downhill and near the busiest transit stops every single morning, leaving the uphill stations stripped completely bare, and so the operators must load racks of bikes onto trucks and haul them back uphill by hand to keep the bike network usable at all.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) by design,
• B) therefore,
• C) for example,
• D) in practice, ✓

Explanation: (D) "In practice" sets the messy real-world behavior against the tidy self-balancing principle just stated; the blank turns from how the system should work to how it actually does. "By design" would say the pile-up was intended, but it is the unwanted outcome the principle failed to prevent. "Therefore" would make the pile-up follow logically from self-balancing, when it actually contradicts it. "For example" would offer the pile-up as an instance of balancing, yet it illustrates the opposite.

Question 4. By the 1850s the navigator's marine chronometer had become a thoroughly trusted shipboard instrument, accurate enough that a careful captain could fix his longitude with real confidence even far from any charted coast. ______ for many generations sailors had often had to rely heavily on dead reckoning, patiently tallying their speed and heading hour by hour on a slate and accepting errors that could place a ship many miles from where its anxious crew firmly believed it to be, with no easy, dependable way to check the guess until landfall.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) All the while,
• B) Before that, ✓
• C) In the same way,
• D) Similarly,

Explanation: (B) "Before that" steps back to the era preceding the reliable chronometer, contrasting confident longitude with the older guesswork; the blank moves the timeline backward to an earlier stage. "All the while" would mark something going on at the same time, but the sentence recalls a separate earlier period. "In the same way" would liken the older method to the chronometer, when the passage contrasts them. "Similarly" would liken the two periods, when the passage contrasts them.

Question 5. When researchers began to doubt whether a celebrated old painting was truly the work of the master to whom it had long been attributed, they first noted that the brushwork in the crowded background was looser and less assured than his confident signature style. ______ an X-ray of the wooden panel revealed a second, abandoned composition hidden beneath the surface, one that matched a known apprentice's documented working habits rather than the master's own, pointing the evidence toward the workshop instead of the man himself.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) More tellingly, ✓
• B) By comparison,
• C) On the contrary,
• D) Until then,

Explanation: (A) "More tellingly" adds the X-ray finding as a stronger, more decisive piece of the same case against the attribution; the blank escalates from a suggestive detail to weightier evidence. "By comparison" would weigh two cases on a shared scale, which is not what the sentence does. "On the contrary" would deny the brushwork point, when the X-ray reinforces it. "Until then" would mark a point in time, while the sentence adds a second, stronger proof.