📐 SAT
📝 ACT
🎓 AP Exams
About Contact Blog Privacy Policy

SAT Reading & Writing: Standard English Conventions (Drill 25)

Drill 25 · Reading & Writing · Standard English Conventions

0 / 5
←
Previous drill
Drill 24
Next drill
Drill 26
→
More Sat Reading Writing Standard English Conventions drills
Drill 1 5 questions → Drill 2 5 questions → Drill 3 5 questions → Drill 4 5 questions → Drill 5 5 questions → Drill 6 5 questions → Drill 7 5 questions → Drill 8 5 questions → Drill 9 5 questions → Drill 10 5 questions → Drill 11 5 questions → Drill 12 5 questions → Drill 13 5 questions → Drill 14 5 questions → Drill 15 5 questions → Drill 16 5 questions → Drill 17 5 questions → Drill 18 5 questions → Drill 19 5 questions → Drill 20 5 questions → Drill 21 5 questions → Drill 22 5 questions → Drill 23 5 questions → Drill 24 5 questions →
Drill 25 — current you are here
Drill 26 5 questions → Drill 27 5 questions → Drill 28 5 questions → Drill 29 5 questions → Drill 30 5 questions →

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Standard English Conventions (Drill 25) is a Reading & Writing practice drill covering Standard English Conventions. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

Five hard SAT Standard English Conventions items covering single dash with a summarizing clause, comma plus coordinating conjunction joining two independent clauses, parallel structure in a verb series, misplaced "only," and past perfect for the earlier of two past events.

Questions & Explanations

Text
Beak shape, body size, and feeding ______ three traits later helped biologists explain how Galápagos finches diversified from a common ancestor.

Question 1. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

  • A) habits, these
  • B) habits — these ✓
  • C) habits; these
  • D) habits: these

Explanation: The dash in (B) correctly links a fronted list (Beak shape, body size, and feeding habits) to the summarizing clause that follows (these three traits later helped biologists explain...). (A) sets a comma between a noun phrase and a full clause, which a comma alone cannot do. (C) puts a semicolon in the same spot, but a semicolon needs a complete clause on both sides, and what comes before is only a list of nouns. (D) tries a colon, which also requires a complete clause on its left side.

Text
Mary Anning helped excavate an ichthyosaur skeleton from the cliffs near Lyme Regis at about age twelve ______ later she unearthed the first complete plesiosaur skeleton described to science.

Question 2. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

  • A) in 1811 and more than a decade
  • B) in 1811; and more than a decade
  • C) in 1811, more than a decade
  • D) in 1811, and more than a decade ✓

Explanation: Two complete sentences sit on either side of the join (one about the 1811 ichthyosaur, one about the plesiosaur more than a decade later), and the standard way to fuse two clauses of this length is comma plus a coordinating conjunction. (D) supplies both. (A) drops the comma, leaving a bare "and" between two long independent clauses. (B) keeps "and" but adds a semicolon, an over-punctuation since the semicolon already does the joining work of comma plus and. (C) leaves the comma without the conjunction, which creates a comma splice.

Text
Christiaan Huygens's 1656 pendulum clock improved horological accuracy enormously: it linked the steady swing of a weighted rod to a clock's escapement, kept time far more accurately than earlier mechanical clocks, and ______ on a single winding for nearly a full day.

Question 3. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

  • A) running
  • B) it ran
  • C) ran ✓
  • D) to run

Explanation: The series here strings three actions on the same subject "it": "linked," "kept," and the blank. To keep parallel form, the third item has to match the others: a past-tense verb without a repeated subject. (C) "ran" does that. (A) shifts to the -ing form, marking "running" as a participle rather than a verb in the series. (B) reintroduces "it," breaking the pattern of three verbs sharing a single subject. (D) shifts to an infinitive, which can't sit alongside "linked" and "kept."

Text
Of the two major German passenger zeppelins flying transatlantic routes in the mid-1930s, ______ was destroyed by fire at Lakehurst on May 6, 1937; the other, Graf Zeppelin, never carried paying passengers again after the disaster.

Question 4. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

  • A) only the Hindenburg ✓
  • B) the Hindenburg only
  • C) the only Hindenburg
  • D) the Hindenburg, only,

Explanation: The sentence contrasts one zeppelin's fate with the other, so the limiter "only" needs to sit immediately before the noun it picks out. (A) places it there: "only the Hindenburg" means that ship and no other. (B) shifts "only" between subject and verb, where it now modifies "was destroyed," reading as "the only thing that happened to the Hindenburg was being destroyed" and so losing the contrast. (C) makes "only" an adjective on "Hindenburg," tagging the ship as unique in the world rather than singling it out from the pair. (D) puts commas on both sides of "only," treating it as a parenthetical aside, an awkward substitute for placing the limiter directly in front of what it limits.

Text
By the time Harriet Tubman launched her famous rescue missions on the Underground Railroad in the early 1850s, she ______ from slavery herself just a year earlier, walking roughly a hundred miles from a Maryland plantation to free territory in Philadelphia.

Question 5. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

  • A) escaped
  • B) had escaped ✓
  • C) was escaping
  • D) has escaped

Explanation: The sentence names two past events with a clear sequence: Tubman's own escape in 1849, then her rescue missions starting in the early 1850s. The earlier of two past events takes the past perfect, so (B) "had escaped" is the right form. (A) flattens both events into the simple past, so the reader can't tell which one came first. (C) puts the escape into the past progressive, as if it were in progress at a single past moment, but the escape was a completed action years before. (D) uses the present perfect "has escaped," which doesn't pair with a specific past time marker like "just a year earlier."