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ACT English 4.2 Passage Drill 175 Views


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Description:

ACT English 4.2 Passage Drill. How would you correct the underlined portion, if at all?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by San Francisco.

00:07

So it was delivered by a smiling streetcar driver along with a box of Rice a Roni.

00:28

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

00:32

who believe?

00:33

And here are the potential answers...

00:38

It’s funny how one little word can throw an entire sentence askew.

00:42

In this case, the word “who” is a real troublemaker.

00:45

See, “who” is what’s known as a relative pronoun.

00:50

Like normal pronouns, a relative pronoun’s job is to stand in for nouns in a sentence.

00:55

However, relative pronouns have the addeduty of introducing relative clauses, which

00:59

modify words, phrases, or ideas.

01:02

So in the sentence in question the relative pronoun “who” signals a clause that describes

01:07

the subject (aka “most people nowadays”).

01:10

The trouble is that by establishing a relative clause the word “who” is stealing the

01:15

verb from the subject of the sentence.

01:18

Like full sentences, relative clauses need a subject and verb to exist.

01:22

If “who” is allowed to have its way, the word “believe” would have to be its verb.

01:28

Unfortunately, this derails everything because the original sentence is trying to use “believe”

01:32

as its verb as well. By stealing the verb from the subject of the sentence,

01:36

“who” makes the entire sentence incomplete.

01:39

Looks like we’d better nix any option with “who” in it before this relative pronoun

01:43

can case any more trouble. Choices (A) and (C) are out of the running.

01:47

Now that we’ve got “who” out of our hair, we can turn our attention to choices (B) and (D).

01:52

The difference here is that (B) uses the simple present tense with “believe,”

01:56

and (D) uses the present progressive with “are believing.”

02:00

Given the two, we’re going with choice (B).

02:02

The simple present tense works better in this context because the writer is talking about

02:06

a general belief that people have.

02:08

The present progressive makes it sound like tons of people are obsessing about the issue

02:12

of the origin of fortune cookies at this very moment.

02:15

Which we hope isn’t true--for the good of the country as a whole.

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