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ACT English 4.3 Passage Drill 183 Views
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Description:
ACT English: Passage Drill Drill 4, Problem 3. Which choice contains the correct tense for this sentence?
Transcript
- 00:03
Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Japan.
- 00:08
So it also came with sushi, advanced electronics, and twisted game shows.
- 00:12
Check out the following passage...
- 00:22
How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all? created by.
- 00:29
And here are the potential answers...
Full Transcript
- 00:34
A helpful thing to remember for this question is that all clauses need a subject and a verb.
- 00:40
Without these basic elements, the clause club is strictly off limits.
- 00:43
Choice (A), for example, creates an incomplete sentence.
- 00:46
The way it’s phrased renders “fortune cookies created by a Japanese man”
- 00:50
as the subject, without leaving any verb to tell us what these Japanese-made fortune cookies did.
- 00:56
(Though we figure they probably did some fortune telling.)
- 01:00
We have a strong feeling the verb “created” needs to function as the verb of this clause
- 01:04
if this sentence is ever going to be complete.
- 01:06
Choice (D) makes a similar mistake. The phrase “having been created by” absorbs the verb
- 01:12
“created,” forcing it to help describe “fortune cookies.”
- 01:15
If we’re going to get a complete sentence out of this deal, we need for the verb to
- 01:18
do its job and tell us what the fortune cookies did.
- 01:22
Choice (C) gets us on the right path. Adding the past tense “to be” verb “were”
- 01:27
finally makes “created” the verb we always knew it could be.
- 01:31
However, there’s a problem here with tense.
- 01:33
“Were being created” is in the past progressive, indicating that the creation of the cookies
- 01:38
was an ongoing process.
- 01:40
The right answer is (B), since the correct tense for this phrase is the simple past tense,
- 01:44
which signals that the cookies were created at a specific moment in the past
- 01:47
and then they stopped being created.
- 01:50
We would like to think fortune cookies are constantly being fine-tuned, with an eye toward
- 01:53
developing a super-fortune cookie that can actually predict the future, but we're not holding our breath.
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