SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 3)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 3) 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 seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza rejected the widely held idea that mind and body are two separate substances that somehow manage to interact across an unbridgeable gap. He held instead that thought and physical extension are simply two aspects of one and the same underlying reality, viewed from different angles; ______ a single event can be described completely in the language of the mind or completely in the language of the body, without either account being the cause of the other.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. The first feature films made with synchronized sound, which arrived in the late 1920s, are often dismissed by critics as clumsy and stagebound, their bulky cameras locked inside soundproof booths to stay within range of fixed, hidden microphones. ______ many of these early sound films do feel static and talky beside the fluid, inventive silent pictures that came just before them. Yet a few directors quickly turned the new constraint into an asset, using sound to build tension precisely where the image was forced to hold still.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Tracking studies that follow individual birds by satellite have revealed that some songbirds migrate thousands of miles along surprisingly narrow corridors, funneling through a mere handful of stopover sites where they rest and refuel before pressing on. The loss of any one of these crowded sites can ripple across an entire population, leaving birds too depleted to complete the journey. ______ several conservation groups have shifted their efforts away from scattered, opportunistic land purchases and toward protecting the specific wetlands and woodlands that lie along these vital flyways.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. Older histories of timekeeping often presented the late-medieval European mechanical clock as a sudden break from everything that came before, a single decisive leap that set Europe apart from the rest of the world and marked the true beginning of precise timekeeping. ______ historians of technology now emphasize a longer and more international story, tracing earlier water-powered clocks and sophisticated regulating mechanisms built in China and the Islamic world many centuries before Europe's weight-driven tower clocks ever became common in its towns and cathedrals.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. The novelist spent three years drafting her sprawling manuscript in near-total isolation, then another full year revising it with a demanding editor who questioned nearly every chapter and cut whole subplots she had labored over. She set the book aside twice, each time convinced it had failed beyond rescue, before returning to it with fresh eyes and a clearer sense of its shape. ______ the version that finally reached print bore little resemblance to her first draft, a fact she came to regard as the whole point of writing rather than a sign of wasted effort.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?