SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 30)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 30) 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. 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?
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?
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?
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?
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?