Naming the Relationship Before Looking at the Choices

Every transition question gives you two sentences and four connectors: something like Consequently, However, By contrast, and In fact. If you read the choices before you have a clear read on the sentences, all four sound fine, because each one is a real word that could join two ideas somehow. The fix is to cover or ignore the choices first. Read sentence one, read sentence two, and say in your own words what the second sentence does to the first one: does it agree and add on, does it flip direction, does it give a reason, does it give a result. Only once you can say that relationship in plain language do you look for the connector that matches it.

Try it: 'The lake froze early. Migration began three weeks late.' Early freeze, late migration. One event seems to have caused or at least preceded the other, so the relationship is closer to a knock-on effect than a straight contrast. A word like Consequently or As a result fits; a contrast word like However does not, because nothing here is being reversed. Notice that the fanciest-sounding word on the list, something dense like Nevertheless or Nonetheless, has no built-in advantage. These questions reward accuracy about logical relationship, not vocabulary level, and a long word used backwards is still wrong.

Sometimes two sentences honestly support more than one connector: a rise in one number and a fall in another could be read as pure contrast or as cause and result, depending on what the surrounding sentences claim. When that happens, go back and check which relationship the rest of the passage is actually asserting, since the question always has exactly one defensible answer once full context is considered. This same habit, naming the relationship before touching the options, is what the adjacent sentence-combining questions ask for too: there you build one sentence from notes to hit a stated goal, and the goal functions exactly like the relationship here, deciding which combination survives.