SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 4)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 4) 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 Roman concrete used in harbor structures and breakwaters two thousand years ago has survived punishing marine conditions that would crumble much modern concrete within a few decades. Far from merely enduring the relentless seawater that batters it, the ancient material seems somehow to benefit from the assault. ______ researchers analyzing core samples have found that, as seawater reacts with the concrete, new interlocking mineral crystals slowly grow inside its cracks, so that the cementing matrix can become more resilient over the passing centuries rather than weaker.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. A museum that wishes to display a fragile medieval tapestry has to carefully limit the light that falls on it, since prolonged exposure gradually fades the delicate plant dyes beyond any hope of recovery. One common approach is to keep the gallery very dim and rotate the textile off display for long stretches of each year, storing it in darkness. ______ conservators can mount the tapestry behind specialized glass coated to filter out ultraviolet light, allowing it to remain on continuous display far longer without suffering the same irreversible damage.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. Solar power has often been dismissed as hopelessly impractical for regions that endure long, cloudy winters, where the panels would seem to sit idle and useless for months on end. ______ several cloudy countries in northern Europe, among them Germany and the Netherlands, have built thriving solar industries, in part because photovoltaic panels actually operate more efficiently in cool air and can feed surplus summer power into shared regional grids that draw on wind and other sources during the months when the skies darken.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. In the open ocean, schooling fish confuse and frustrate predators by moving together as a single shimmering mass, wheeling and contracting in unison so that no individual fish ever stands out long enough to become a target. ______ flocks of starlings wheel through the evening sky in dense, shifting clouds known as murmurations, their thousands of synchronized turns rippling outward in waves and making it nearly impossible for a pursuing hawk to lock onto any one bird among the swirling multitude.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. A base-editing technique can be remarkably precise, able to correct certain single-letter mutations in a genome of three billion letters without creating a double-strand break, which can occur with some earlier editing methods and can introduce new errors. ______ it remains stubbornly difficult to deliver the editing molecules into the right cells deep inside a living body, and until that delivery obstacle is solved, the technique's extraordinary precision cannot be put to full use in treating actual patients.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?