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ACT English 3.11 Passage Drill 176 Views


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ACT English: Passage Drill Drill 3, Problem 11. How should we punctuate this list?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by natural disasters. If you think they're

00:08

bad, you should see what an unnatural disaster looks like.

00:28

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

00:32

air, water, and, small objects

00:34

And here are the potential answers...

00:40

Sometimes in life, things are actually easy.

00:43

This question is a much welcome example of that.

00:45

To locate the correct answer all we need to know is that when three or more nouns appear

00:50

in a list, they have to be separated by commas.

00:53

Thus, our eye is immediately drawn to choice (B), which has no commas at all. See how the

00:57

items mush together without commas to separate them?

01:00

If there's one thing that's hated in English language circles, it's mushy sentences.

01:04

So we'll eliminate (B) before it can cause any more trouble.

01:07

Option (D) doesn't do a whole lot better.

01:09

There's no grammatical reason to place a comma between the words "small" and "objects." In

01:13

fact, there's a great grammatical reason to avoid doing this at all costs.

01:17

"Small" is an adjective describing "objects." If we place a comma between a single adjective

01:23

and the word it's trying to modify, we're seriously asking for trouble.

01:27

This brings us to choices (A) and (C). Of the two, (C) is the best answer, since (A)

01:32

needlessly places a comma after the word "and."

01:36

In celebration of this question, we made a list of three items, too:

01:39

1. Get away from these raining frogs!

01:40

2. Get further away.

01:42

3. Stay away.

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