A transition question with phrase choices tests how one sentence connects to what came before. Cover the choices and shrink the sentences around the blank to a few words each. Then name the direction and job: does the sentence add, give a result, go against a point, or mark time? Read each phrase by its literal meaning, and check what any phrase that points back refers to. A phrase must describe the earlier point accurately and show how it connects to what follows.
Hints
- Hint 1
Read the sentence beginning “The wording” and the whole sentence after the blank. Shrink what each says about the description.
- Hint 2
Check what the condition after the comma limits in the final sentence.
- Hint 3
Swap in each transition's literal meaning. For a phrase that points back, ask which earlier sentence it refers to and whether it correctly links that sentence to the final one.
Step-by-step
Shrink and test the phrases
Step 1Find the warning
The sentence before the blank says some brain cells and metabolic processes continue to require glucose, and the liver still supplies it. What point does the transition need to carry forward? The wording can mislead readers because a change in the main fuel isn't a total switch. That's a limit on the description.
- Step 2
Name the final sentence's job
Now ask what the final sentence does with that limit. It says the description remains useful as shorthand, but only provided it is not taken to mean that glucose use stops entirely. That condition accepts the warning rather than erasing it, so the description's value and its limit can both be true. The sentence makes a turn: the shorthand stays useful despite its limit.
- Step 3
Test an example and a shared reason
For example means here's one case of the earlier point, but the final sentence doesn't give a case of a cell or process needing glucose. By the same token means for the same reason, but continued glucose use explains why the wording can mislead, not why it remains useful as shorthand. Neither phrase captures the turn from a limit to continued value.
- Step 4
Match the reference and the link
Which earlier point does each remaining phrase name? Even with that explanatory value means despite that value, but the claim that the wording captures a genuine shift in the brain's main fuel supports its usefulness. That limitation notwithstanding means despite that limit, so it links the warning that glucose use continues to the description's value when readers understand that limit. Choice A.