ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Wild Birds.

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I have always wanted to go to the bird estuary, observing wild birds in their natural habitat

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is a passion of mine.

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First of all, this thing sounds like two sentences. When you use a comma to join two independent

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clauses, or sentence pieces... it's called a comma splice.

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So, let's if we can find another answer with a better way to combine these two clauses.

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What about B? This time, the two sentences are joined with the word and.

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And is a conjunction, and their buddy is the comma,

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and they're pretty much inseparable

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when they join independent clauses.

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For the sentence to be grammatically correct,

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it needs a comma. But beyond that, it doesn't really make

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sense to use "and" here. Let's see if we can find a more natural conjunction in another

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sentence. C... no way, no how. There's no conjunction...

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D looks much more promising. It uses "because" as a subordinating conjunction.

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Notice "because" works better than and, because the second clause explains the first

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one pretty well. So the answer is D.

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And hey, if you get it wrong, you can always try bribing the ACT test administrators with

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tickets to that bird estuary...

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