SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 30)

Question 1. It is often said flatly that learning a second language as an adult is simply harder than learning one as a young child. The claim holds ______ many adults never quite lose a foreign accent, and the easy, automatic fluency of a true native speaker can stay just out of reach no matter how patiently they study. But adults also bring patience, disciplined study habits, and a conscious grasp of grammar that let them substantially outpace small children in the early months of taking up a new tongue.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) after all:
• B) for instance:
• C) as expected:
• D) up to a point: ✓

Explanation: (D) "Up to a point" grants the claim only partway, conceding the accent and fluency gap before the following "But" marks where the claim stops holding; the blank signals limited, partial agreement. "After all" would offer what follows as confirming support for the claim, but the passage is about to push against it. "For instance" would make the accent gap a plain example, missing the hedged, partial agreement the sentence sets up. "As expected" would stress that the difficulty was predictable, when the point is that the claim is only partly true.

Question 2. Critics of the new museum wing argued that a building ought to answer to its neighbors, echoing the warm brick and the modest scale of the old street around it rather than standing deliberately apart from everything. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that one fully grants that standard. ______ the glass wing really does fail, looming coldly over its low masonry neighbors in a way that ignores them entirely. The harder question is whether blending into the surroundings is the only standard worth applying to a brand-new building.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) All the same,
• B) For example,
• C) On those terms, ✓
• D) In any event,

Explanation: (C) "On those terms" applies the just-granted standard and reaches the verdict that follows from it; the blank judges the wing by the premise the sentence agreed to accept. "All the same" would press on despite the standard, but the sentence reasons from within it. "For example" would offer the wing as an instance of something prior, when it is being judged against an accepted rule. "In any event" would set the standard aside as not decisive, while the sentence instead adopts it to draw a conclusion.

Question 3. The official report on the failed rail merger was careful and diplomatic throughout, observing that the two companies had displayed an insufficient alignment of operational cultures and a suboptimal integration of their respective scheduling systems. ______ the trains could not be made to run on a single shared timetable, the crews of the two lines followed flatly incompatible rules, and the savings the merger had loudly promised investors never appeared, because the two railways had never genuinely become one company at all.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) In its own way,
• B) For its part,
• C) All the same,
• D) Plainly, ✓

Explanation: (D) "Plainly" recasts the report's guarded wording in blunt, ordinary terms; the blank restates the same failure more directly. "In its own way" would soften toward a fresh angle, but the sentence bluntly restates the same point rather than reframing it. "For its part" would shift to another party's view, when the sentence translates the same point. "All the same" would concede against the prior sentence, yet nothing is being conceded.

Question 4. Planting a row of trees along a city street does the obvious good of casting cool shade, and on a blazing summer afternoon the shaded sidewalk beneath a line of broad maples is something a passerby can feel almost at once. ______ those very same trees quietly soften the rain as well, their spreading roots and the loosened soil around them drinking up the runoff that would otherwise rush straight off the hard pavement into the storm drains and overwhelm them during a single heavy downpour.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) Obviously,
• B) Less obviously, ✓
• C) In contrast,
• D) To that end,

Explanation: (B) "Less obviously" adds a second, subtler benefit to the plain one of shade, marking it as the harder-to-notice effect; the blank stacks a quieter point onto the evident one. "Obviously" would mark the rain effect as plain to see, but the passage frames shade as the obvious benefit and this as the hidden one. "In contrast" would oppose the two effects, when both are advantages that add up. "To that end" would frame the rain effect as a goal the shade serves, which it does not.

Question 5. A single small leak in the long earthen dike began as little more than a dark, damp patch low on the inland face, the kind of thing easy to miss entirely in the flat gray light of early morning; ______ the thin trickle steadily widened its own narrow channel grain by grain, pulling wet sand out from the heart of the bank, until what had started as a harmless seep had become a gaping breach that the alarmed villagers fought all through the night to close before the sea could pour through.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• A) from there, ✓
• B) in contrast,
• C) all the same,
• D) by comparison,

Explanation: (A) "From there" carries the process forward from the small starting leak to the widening breach it became; the blank marks the next step proceeding from an established point. "In contrast" would oppose the widening to the leak, when one grows directly out of the other. "All the same" would concede a tension, but the sentence follows a chain of events instead. "By comparison" would weigh two cases on a scale, which the passage does not do.