The SAT Prep Black Book(143)
In this sentence, an acceptable form for (A) might have been either “led” or “had led.”
You may be thinking that this is all a bit complicated right now, and I don’t blame you. Luckily, there’s a relatively easy way to keep it all straight. When you see a compound verb in English, the tense of the helping verb is the same as the tense of the overall verb phrase. So, in this case, we can tell that “has led” is a present-tense verb because the helping verb “has” is a present-tense verb.
Don’t worry about the issue in this question too much. For one thing, it’s fairly easy to identify the tense of a verb phrase using the helping-verb method I just described. For another thing, there aren’t a ton of questions that test verb-tenses as sneakily as this one does. So it’s fairly unlikely that you’ll see something like this on test day, and, even if you do, it’s not that hard to focus on the tense of the helping verb anyway.
Page 535, Question 29
This is one of the relatively rare SAT Writing questions that tests the idea of redundancy. In this case, (D) restates the idea of the word “annually” from earlier in the sentence, so we should remove it because it’s redundant according to the rules of the College Board. Notice that “annually” isn’t underlined as well, because, if it were, there would be no way to say whether “annually” or the phrase in (D) should be removed to fix the redundancy.
Page 601, Question 19
Test-takers frequently miss this question because they don’t like the phrase “in which,” and would like to change it to something like “where” or “whose.”
But we have to remember that we can only choose answers that represent verifiable grammatical mistakes, and “in which” is not a grammatical mistake. “Which” is referring back to the word “cities;” since “which” can refer to either singular or plural words as long as they aren’t people, it’s fine here. And “in” is an okay pronoun to use with “cities,” since cities are physical locations and it’s possible to be located inside them.
People sometimes also want to pick (C) or (D) because of the passive-voice construction they create, but, as always, we have to remember that the College Board doesn’t consider the passive voice to be a grammatical mistake. So the answer is (E), because the College Board doesn’t see anything wrong with any of the phrasing in this sentence.
Let this question serve as an important reminder to look only for grammatical mistakes and ignore everything else!
Page 602, Question 27
This question, like many others, tests your ability to recognize a mismatch between singular and plural phrases. In this case, the singular verb “was” needs to agree with the plural phrase “the proposed health clinics and the proposed center,” so (A) is the answer. If (A) had been the word “were,” it would have been fine.
Even though test-takers should know to look out for mismatches between singular and plural phrases, many people miss questions like this because the word-order is a little abnormal (since the verb comes before the noun). Remember that underlined phrases might have to agree with words that come before them or after them, and always consider the entire sentence when looking for mismatches!
Page 659, Question 25
This is one of those questions that people often miss if they aren’t familiar with some of the College Board’s more idiosyncratic grammatical rules. We have to remember that the SAT doesn’t allow us to substitute words like “with” where the word “and” could have worked, so (C) needs to read “and a decrease.” (Of course, it’s okay to use the word “with” in other contexts on the SAT. We just can’t use it as a replacement for “and.”)
This is a rule that tends to be tested more frequently on the Improving Sentences questions, but, as this question demonstrates, we’ll sometimes see it tested in the Identifying Sentence Errors questions.
Page 720, Question 16
Test-takers often miss this question because they think that “its” should be “their,” but if we read carefully we’ll see that “its” is actually correct. The thing doing the eating is technically the word “each,” which is singular. So the answer here is (E).
This question demonstrates how critical it is that we pay very careful attention to the details of the sentences we encounter. Remember that paying attention to details is one of the most important skills to have for the entire SAT!
Page 721, Question 25