SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 7)

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Transitions (Drill 7) 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 Greenland shark grows so slowly, barely a centimeter a year, that a single animal can live for centuries, an almost unbelievable lifespan for a vertebrate. The figure is no exaggeration drawn from legend. ______ radiocarbon dating of proteins in their eye lenses suggests that some individuals swimming today may be nearly four centuries old, with the oldest estimates stretching well past three hundred years. Few creatures with backbones come anywhere close to such a span, which makes this slow northern shark a genuine outlier among them.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
2. Soil scientists once treated the fine fungi threading through a forest floor as minor tenants of the ecosystem, useful for breaking down litter but essentially peripheral. Careful tracing of carbon and nutrients through forest soils has complicated that view, revealing that the fungal networks can move resources between roots and may link neighboring trees in intricate ways. ______ these buried threads are now mapped as living infrastructure in their own right, surveyed and protected much as a city planner would treat the pipes and cables beneath a street rather than the plain soil around them.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
3. The conductor and teacher Nadia Boulanger believed that a young composer learned far more from analyzing a single Bach chorale in exhaustive depth than from skimming dozens of scores in a hurry. She wanted her students to feel how every inner voice earned its place in the harmony before they ever set down a bar of their own. ______ she would assign one short passage for an entire week, returning to it from a fresh analytical angle each day until its logic had become second nature to everyone in the room.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
4. For years, local guides told visitors that the bright turquoise of certain alpine lakes came from colored minerals dissolved in the water, as if the vivid hue were a kind of permanent stain soaked through it. Closer study tells a rather different story. The color is not dissolved into the water at all; ______ it comes from fine rock flour, ground by glaciers upstream and held in suspension, which scatters incoming light back toward the surface. Filter off that floating powder in a glass and the striking color vanishes along with it.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?
5. When a beaver dam raises the water level behind it, the pooled water spreads sideways into the surrounding soil and slows its own headlong rush downhill. The soaked ground then stores moisture that would otherwise run off in a single sudden pulse after every heavy storm. ______ streams below the dam keep flowing steadily through dry spells that would leave an undammed channel cracked and bare, so a structure built by one family of beavers ends up steadying the water supply of a whole valley.
   
   Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?