A transition question with longer choices tests how the ideas around the blank relate. Cover the choices and shrink each sentence to what it says, keeping different views separate. Then ask what the ending does with those views. A longer transition makes a claim, so it must describe the earlier sentences accurately, and the ending must support that claim. Wrong choices can sound smooth while adding a connection the text doesn't give you.
Hints
- Hint 1
Shrink the first two sentences to what each group of historians credits for the maps' growing precision.
- Hint 2
In the ending, look for what each factor explains. What does possible tell you about improved instruments, and what does valuable tell you about legal demands?
Step-by-step
Shrink the accounts and test the link
Step 1Shrink the instrument account
The first group credits adoption of standardized instruments for the maps' growing precision. For this transition, let's shrink that view to better instruments helped cartographers make more precise maps. What kind of reason does it give? It's about the tools cartographers used, which could help them draw more accurate boundaries.
- Step 2
Shrink the legal-use account
Why would the maps' use in property disputes matter? The second group says city councils increasingly required them in property disputes, giving cartographers reason to mark boundaries carefully. Let's shrink that to legal use encouraged precision. This account explains why accurate boundaries were worth drawing, because councils needed those boundaries when settling disputes.
- Step 3
Find the ending's job
Read the ending: does it reject either account, or use both? Instruments may have made greater precision possible, while legal demands made that precision valuable. Possible is about being able to draw precise maps, and valuable is about having a reason to do so. These roles can work together because cartographers can have both better tools and a reason to draw boundaries carefully. The ending shows how the accounts work together to explain the change, not to make one explanation replace the other.
- Step 4
Match the wording to that job
Which phrase names that relationship? Distinct means different, and complementary means different parts that work together. The phrase distinct but complementary aspects of the change describes the earlier accounts, and the colon introduces the ending as an explanation of each account's role. Choice A.