SAT — transitions

A transition question is a reading question wearing a grammar question's clothes. Nothing about the four words offered will tell you which is right; what decides it is the relation between the two statements on either side of the blank, and that has to be worked out from their content before the choices are looked at. These ten passages each set up one relation unmistakably, and there is one question for each of the ten relations a transition can mark.

The order to work in is the order the explanations use: say what the relation is in your own words first, then find the word for it. A discovery of tablets in an unknown script is followed by researchers who could not read them — that is a consequence, and only then does "Consequently" become obvious. An orchid that thrives high up and fails in a greenhouse is a contrast. A guild rule requiring seven years of service and a fee beyond most families is an instance of the general claim that the rules kept newcomers out. A committee that admits the cuts will hurt and insists on them anyway has conceded a point and pressed on. Reading the four options first is what makes these questions slow, because two of them will usually sound acceptable in isolation.

Several items are built around the near miss rather than the obvious error. One passage names reclaimed materials and then describes turning a hall to face south: an illustrating transition would be right if that were another material, and it is a decision about orientation instead, so the sentence adds rather than illustrates. Another sets a laboratory's temperature requirement against what happens if the requirement is not met, which is a conditional consequence and not a plain result — "Otherwise" and "Therefore" do different work. Two questions include, among their wrong answers, a transition asserting the opposite relation to the right one, since reaching for a contrast word where a consequence is meant is the commonest way this type is failed.

Every explanation names the relation each wrong choice would have asserted and says why the passage does not support it, which is more useful than being told the choice is simply wrong: the four relations are a small set, and learning to tell them apart is the whole of the skill.

Every excavation, guild, architect, painter and laboratory in these passages is invented, and no invented finding is attributed to any real organization or institution. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication, released test, practice test, question bank or scoring guideline.

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• State the relation between two statements before looking at the transitions offered
• Recognize a consequence and distinguish it from a conditional consequence
• Tell an addition from an illustration, by asking whether the second statement is an instance of the first
• Identify a concession, where a point is granted before the writer presses on
• Recognize a restatement that puts a claim more plainly rather than adding to it
• Distinguish comparison from addition when two parallel cases are described
• Spot a chronological shift and choose a transition of sequence rather than of result
• Recognize a conclusion drawn together from evidence already given
• Reject a transition asserting the opposite relation to the one the passage establishes
• Name what relation a wrong transition would have claimed, rather than dismissing it as simply wrong

"Several of the merchant guild's rules were designed less to protect customers than to keep newcomers out of the trade. ________, an apprentice could not open a workshop of his own until he had served under a master for seven years and had paid a fee that few families could raise." Which choice completes the writer's text with the most logical transition?