A transition question tests how a sentence connects to the ideas before it. Cover the choices and shrink both sentences to a few words, keeping what each says rather than only its topic. When a sentence gives an interpretation, ask what the next sentence does with it. Name how the ideas connect: does it add support, show a result, turn against the idea, or place events in time? Words can sound smooth in the blank and still name the wrong relationship.
Hints
- Hint 1
Read the sentence beginning “This pattern suggests” alongside the whole sentence after the blank. Shrink what each says about the narrator's response to betrayal.
- Hint 2
Look at both parts of the narrator's response in the final sentence: what she doesn't do and what she does right away.
- Hint 3
Does that response make the previous interpretation more believable, less believable, or neither? Name the link between the interpretation and the scene.
Step-by-step
Shrink and name the link
Step 1Shrink the writer's interpretation
The sentence before the blank says she avoids not the evidence itself but its painful implications. That's the interpretation the transition must connect to the final scene. How can we shrink it? She sees the clues but resists accepting what the betrayal means. The writer has moved beyond the earlier description of her as naïve.
- Step 2
Read both parts of the final scene
What does the narrator do when the betrayal is stated outright? She does not express surprise, which fits someone who has already seen the evidence. She immediately offers a reason the betrayal should be forgiven, turning to how she can make the betrayal less painful to accept. She's not reacting as if she has missed the clues; she's trying to soften what the betrayal means.
- Step 3
Name the link and test the transitions
How does this scene relate to the writer's view? The scene supports the writer's view and makes it more believable. Instead means in place of something else, but the scene doesn't replace the interpretation. Nevertheless means despite that, but the response doesn't work against the interpretation. Conversely introduces an opposite relationship, but this scene shows the behavior the writer described.
- Step 4
Test the confirming transition
Indeed means in fact and introduces a point that confirms or strengthens the one before it. Here, Indeed shows that the final scene supports the claim about its painful implications. It doesn't start a different argument. Choice A.