For this question, we have to think very carefully about the meanings of the words “results” and “as.” The verb “results” indicates that a process has finished and an outcome has been achieved, but the word “as” indicates that something is still going on. We would need to change “as” to a word like “when” or “after” in order for this to work. So (C) is correct.
This question is one that students ask about pretty frequently, and it really helps to demonstrate how important it is to read things carefully and to think about them carefully. Most people who read this sentence end up feeling that it’s a little odd, but they don’t scrutinize the sentence carefully enough to realize where the mistake lies.
Page 721, Question 28
This is another question that test-takers often struggle with, but the issue here is actually very simple: “neither” has to be followed by “nor,” not by “or.” So (D) is the mistake. Remember that the last few sentences in the Identifying Sentence Errors questions might have bizarre word orders, but they test the same basic concepts as the rest of the questions.
Page 838, Question 19
This is a sentence that probably sounds pretty normal to speakers of American English, but we have to remember that the SAT is interested in whether sentences follow its grammar rules, not in how they sound. For the College Board, the problem here is the use of “your.” Since the reader can’t possibly be a person living in an ancient society, “your” isn’t appropriate in the eyes of the College Board. It might have been okay to replace “your” with “their” (referring to the word “people” at the beginning of the sentence). So (D) is correct.
Page 839, Question 26
This question is a great example of the way the College Board can keep testing the same basic concepts in subtle ways that sometimes go unnoticed by test-takers.
In this case, we need to remember that the College Board only lets us use the word “it” when the rest of the sentence contains a singular noun that “it” can refer to. If we look carefully, we’ll see that this sentence has no singular noun that “it” can refer to—the phrase “to relive the moment” is a verb phrase, not a noun phrase. So (D) is the mistake here.
If we wanted to correct this sentence, we could change “do it” to “do so.” (Of course, you don’t have to correct anything on this part of the test, but I wanted to explain the correct version of this phrase because many students aren’t familiar with the idea of using “to do so” when referring to a verb phrase.)
As we can see from this question, it’s very important that we always remember to check the rest of the sentence for an appropriate singular noun whenever we see the word “it” underlined! It’s also important to remember that SAT grammar sometimes deviates from normal American speech, especially when the words “it” or “they” are involved.
Page 894, Question 15
Even though this sentence is pretty long, the issue being tested is fairly simple. The word “which” can’t be used to refer to people; the correct form would have been “who.” So (B) is the right answer. Remember to take each sentence phrase-by-phrase, and not to let yourself get overwhelmed just because a particular sentence is very long.
Page 895, Question 23
This question involves two of the College Board’s favorite things to include in an Identifying Sentence Errors question: a mismatch between singular and plural phrases, and an intervening prepositional phrase designed to keep you from noticing that mismatch.
The plural verb-form “show” in choice (A) needs to be “shows,” in order to match with the singular noun “observation” at the beginning of the sentence, because the observation is what’s doing the showing. Notice that the phrase “of diverse animal species” has been placed between the subject and the verb, in an attempt to get you to forget that the subject was singular by the time you get to the verb.
As always, it’s important to read everything very carefully and not to get sidetracked by the College Board’s tricks!
Page 956, Question 17
In this question, “are” needs to be “were” in order to match the past-tense verb phrases “were watching” and “feared” in the rest of the sentence. So (D) is the correct answer.
We know that the verbs’ tenses need to match in this question because the phrase “just when” indicates that all the verbs are happening at the same time. Remember that verb phrases on the SAT Writing section can’t create situations that are logically impossible.