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ACT English 1.4 Passage Drill 201 Views


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ACT English: Passage Drill 1, Problem 4. Which selection has the correct punctuation?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:00

Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by fibrous one-seeded drupes. Which sound

00:09

suspiciously like an invention of Dr. Seuss.

00:16

Check out the following passage…

00:25

How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

00:29

fruit with

00:30

And here are the potential answers:

00:33

A little punctuation knowledge is necessary to nail down the answer to this question.

00:37

Without it, we’re lost--and we hate being lost.

00:40

We’ll eliminate choice (D) first. It’s incorrect because colons introduce lists,

00:45

emphasize things, or define terms.

00:49

And none of those are happening in this sentence.

00:51

We hereby “sentence” choice (D) to spend some time learning about colons.

00:55

(C) is incorrect too.

00:56

There’s absolutely no good reason to add a comma after “with” in this sentence.

01:01

Breaking the thought there makes zero sense. It’s almost like somebody added a comma

01:05

randomly just to see what would happen.

01:07

This leaves us with choices (A) and (B).

01:10

(B) separates “with” from the earlier part of the sentence with a comma, while (A)

01:14

lets it ride with no comma at all.

01:16

Turns out that (A) wins this round.

01:19

Commas are often used to separate nonessential parts of sentences.

01:24

The phrase that “with” introduces, however, is essential to the meaning of this sentence.

01:29

Without this phrase, we’d have no idea that “a drupe is a fruit with a hard stony cover.”

01:35

And, of course, we’d all be lost without that essential bit of knowledge…

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