SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 28)

Question 1. A baker working with a live sourdough starter has to feed it on a fairly regular schedule, discarding part of the culture each time and mixing in fresh flour and water so that the resident yeast and bacteria always have something to live on; ______ the hungry microbes slowly exhaust their food supply, grow sour and sluggish in the jar, and lose the lively lift that makes a loaf rise, until the starter itself has to be coaxed patiently back to strength or simply begun again from scratch.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) in particular,
• B) otherwise, ✓
• C) likewise,
• D) as planned,

Explanation: (B) "Otherwise" names what happens if the feeding is neglected, the alternative outcome to the upkeep just described; the blank turns from a required condition to the result of failing to meet it. "In particular" would narrow the feeding routine into a detail, when the sentence describes the opposite scenario. "Likewise" would add a parallel, but the sentence states a contrasting consequence. "As planned" would mark the expected good outcome, while this is the failure case.

Question 2. People like to picture scientific breakthroughs arriving in a single flash of insight, one brilliant mind suddenly seeing clearly what no one had managed to see before. Sometimes discovery really does work that way. ______ it comes instead from long years of patient laboratory work, or from a dozen separate research groups around the world inching toward the very same result at almost the same time, so that the eventual public credit could just as easily have landed on any one of several rival teams.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) For that reason,
• B) In short,
• C) Admittedly,
• D) Just as often, ✓

Explanation: (D) "Just as often" presents the slow, collective route to discovery as equally common as the flash of insight, weighing the two against each other by frequency; the blank balances a second case of comparable weight. "For that reason" would make the slow route a consequence of the flash, but they are alternative paths. "In short" would summarize, when a new and contrasting case is introduced. "Admittedly" would concede a single qualifying point, while the sentence sets out a fully parallel alternative.

Question 3. When the first public coffeehouses opened their doors in seventeenth-century London, they were treated mainly as passing novelties, places to sample a strange bitter drink that very few people in the city had ever tasted before. ______ they had become something far more useful: busy rooms where merchants traded the latest news, writers argued politics late into the evening, and shippers struck deals over the day's arrivals, so that a single coffeehouse might double as a newsroom and a trading floor at once.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) Soon enough, ✓
• B) Even so,
• C) On the contrary,
• D) Predictably,

Explanation: (A) "Soon enough" carries the timeline forward from the coffeehouses' novelty to the larger role they soon filled; the blank marks the next stage in a sequence. "Even so" would concede a tension, but the sentence advances the story rather than countering it. "On the contrary" would deny the first stage, when the second grows out of it over time. "Predictably" would stress that the change was expected, which is not the point being made.

Question 4. A lighthouse keeper's nightly job was never only a matter of lighting the great lamp at dusk and leaving it to burn. The heavy glass lens had to be polished free of soot and salt each morning so the beam would carry cleanly out to sea; ______ the clockwork that slowly rotated the light had to be wound and watched right through the night, since a flash that quietly stopped turning could be mistaken for some other light and lure a trusting ship toward the very rocks the tower was meant to warn it away from.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) instead,
• B) by contrast,
• C) no less important, ✓
• D) in effect,

Explanation: (C) "No less important" adds a second duty of the same weight as the polishing, presenting the two as co-equal demands; the blank places another requirement beside the first rather than ranking or opposing them. "Instead" would replace the polishing with the winding, but both are required. "By contrast" would oppose the two duties, when they belong together. "In effect" would restate the prior point, yet a new and distinct task is introduced.

Question 5. A salt marsh lying between the open sea and the low coastal fields does quiet but vital work during a storm. Its dense, matted grasses and spongy peat soak up the surging water and slow it down, then drain it away gradually over the long hours that follow rather than letting it slam ashore all at once. ______ the marsh behaves as a kind of buffer, absorbing the first heavy blow of the sea so that the farmland lying behind it never has to take that blow directly.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) In the meantime,
• B) For instance,
• C) Until then,
• D) In effect, ✓

Explanation: (D) "In effect" restates the marsh's described action as the single idea it amounts to, a buffer; the blank recasts a mechanism as its net upshot. "In the meantime" would mark something happening in the interval, when the sentence sums up the marsh's overall role. "For instance" would give an example, when the sentence states the overall effect. "Until then" would mark a point in time, which the sentence is not tracking.