SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 5)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 5) 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 gnarled bristlecone pines that cling to a few wind-scoured high ridges in the White Mountains of eastern California are among the oldest living things on Earth, with some individuals having stood in the same spot for nearly 5,000 years, older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Their extraordinary longevity sets them far apart from most other trees; ______ many familiar lowland trees, such as the oaks and maples of an ordinary forest, live only a few centuries before disease, fire, or storm finally brings them down.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Sound travels through water more than four times faster than it travels through air, and in the deep ocean a low-pitched call can carry for hundreds of miles through cold, dense layers before finally fading into the background. Many baleen whales have evolved to exploit this property, producing booming low-frequency calls that can travel across vast stretches of ocean; ______ whales scattered over great distances may still remain in acoustic contact, a form of communication that would be utterly impossible to manage by sight alone.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The English painter J. M. W. Turner became fascinated late in his long career with the way intense light could seem to dissolve solid forms, softening and dimming the firm boundaries between sky, sea, and land until they blurred and bled into one another on the canvas. ______ in his turbulent studies of storms at sea he let the horizon vanish almost entirely into a haze of spray and cloud, so that a viewer can no longer tell where the churning gray water ends and the heavy, rain-soaked sky begins.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. The marine biologist wanted to know how far individual sea turtles actually roam between two places: the remote beaches where they hatch and later return to nest as adults, and the distant feeding grounds where they spend most of their lives, a sprawling migration that earlier researchers had struggled to trace from end to end. ______ she carefully fitted a small group of adult turtles with lightweight satellite tags, then spent the next two years watching the incoming signals trace long, looping paths across thousands of miles of open ocean.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. Seen from a quiet trail on a still afternoon, an old-growth forest can look like a settled, almost timeless place, a cathedral of towering trees that appear to have stood serenely undisturbed in the same arrangement for many centuries. ______ such a forest is in fact in constant slow motion: old giants crash down and tear open sunlit gaps in the canopy, seedlings race one another upward to fill them, and fungi and insects steadily recycle the fallen wood that litters the shadowed ground.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?