SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 27)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 27) 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 new dam was proposed on the river, the regional power authority stressed the steady electricity and the reliable flood control it would bring to the towns downstream, presenting the project as an unambiguous public gain. The upstream farming families, ______ saw that very same plan mainly as the loss of the fertile bottomland fields their households had worked for generations, soon to vanish for good beneath the rising reservoir. The two sides were describing one dam in almost completely opposite terms.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The committee reviewing the old stone bridge found real arguments on both sides of the question. Repairing the original arches would cost far more than a plain modern replacement and would close the only road into the village for a full working season; still, the bridge anchored the town's main street and drew the visitors who came partly just to see it. ______ the members judged that the case for preservation clearly outweighed the savings a replacement promised, and they voted to restore the structure.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. A cheetah is built for one explosive burst of speed: it can overtake nearly any animal on the open plain, but only across a short chase before the effort becomes unsustainable and the animal must break off and stop to recover. ______ a pronghorn is built for endurance, holding a swift, steady pace mile after mile without ever seeming to tire, so that an animal built to win a short sprint may still lose a long pursuit outright. Speed, in these two animals, means almost opposite things.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. A coral reef depends on a quiet partnership most divers never stop to notice: the coral animal houses tiny algae within its own tissues, and the algae repay that shelter by feeding it sugars they manufacture directly from sunlight. ______ the lichen spreading over a bare rock is not one organism in the usual sense but a close partnership between a fungus and a photosynthetic partner, an alga or a cyanobacterium, bound so tightly that each supplies what the other cannot. Both the reef and the lichen are partnerships passing as single living things.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The chance discovery of a cheap synthetic dye in the 1850s suddenly made bright purple cloth affordable to almost anyone who happened to want it. ______ purple had been among the most costly colors anywhere in the world, extracted in tiny quantities from the glands of sea snails and reserved by both custom and high expense for royalty and the very richest families. A hue that had signaled high rank for many centuries became, almost overnight, simply one more color on the draper's shelf.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?