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

SAT Reading & Writing: Standard English Conventions (Drill 27)

Drill 27 · Reading & Writing · Standard English Conventions

0 / 5
←
Previous drill
Drill 26
Next drill
Drill 28
→
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 5 questions → Drill 26 5 questions →
Drill 27 — current you are here
Drill 28 5 questions → Drill 29 5 questions → Drill 30 5 questions →

About This Drill

SAT Reading & Writing: Standard English Conventions (Drill 27) 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 comma usage with a compound predicate, restrictive "who" picking out a person from a group, finite versus nonfinite verb forms after "since," subject-verb agreement with "each of," and unambiguous pronoun reference between two named figures.

Questions & Explanations

Text
Lucy, the *Australopithecus afarensis* skeleton excavated at Hadar in 1974, showed clear adaptations to bipedal walking in the pelvis and ______ climbing-related features in the upper limbs, a mosaic that has reshaped paleoanthropology.

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

  • A) femur, and retained
  • B) femur; and retained
  • C) femur; retained
  • D) femur and retained ✓

Explanation: The sentence has one subject (Lucy) doing two things: she "showed" adaptations to bipedalism, and she "retained" climbing-related features. That is a compound predicate, not two independent clauses, and a compound predicate takes no comma before "and." (D) leaves the comma out, which is right. (A) inserts a comma before "and," a punctuation move reserved for joining two full clauses with their own subjects. (B) and (C) both try a semicolon, but a semicolon needs an independent clause on each side, and "retained climbing-related features in the upper limbs" is only a verb phrase with no subject of its own. (B) compounds the error by keeping "and" on top of the semicolon.

Text
The Greek ______ produced one of the tallest structures of the ancient world, a roughly 100-meter lighthouse that stood for more than fifteen centuries before earthquakes left it in ruins in the early 1300s.

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

  • A) architect, who designed the Pharos of Alexandria around 280 BCE,
  • B) architect who designed the Pharos of Alexandria around 280 BCE ✓
  • C) architect, designing the Pharos of Alexandria around 280 BCE,
  • D) architect which designed the Pharos of Alexandria around 280 BCE

Explanation: "The Greek architect" alone is far too general (many Greek architects worked in antiquity), so the relative clause that names the Pharos is essential to identify which one. Essential relative clauses take no commas, so (B) is the convention-conforming form. (A) sets the clause off with paired commas, treating it as nonessential extra information, but stripping the clause out leaves the reader with no idea which architect the sentence means. (C) keeps the commas and switches to "designing," a participial phrase that floats as extra information. (D) uses "which," which applies to things, not to people.

Text
Since their excavation in 1939 from a Suffolk burial mound, the Sutton Hoo ship burial and its contents ______ scholars' understanding of Anglo-Saxon material culture, revealing a sophisticated network of trade that reached from Byzantium to the British Isles.

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

  • A) have reshaped ✓
  • B) reshaping
  • C) to reshape
  • D) reshaped

Explanation: The main clause needs a finite verb after the long opening modifier, and "since" pairs with the present perfect to describe a stretch of time running from a past start to the present. (A) "have reshaped" gives both: a finite verb in the right tense, agreeing with the plural compound subject "the ship burial and its contents." (B) "reshaping" is a participle, not a finite verb, so the main clause would be left without one. (C) "to reshape" is an infinitive, with the same problem. (D) "reshaped" is finite but pairs the simple past with "since," a combination English does not allow.

Text
Each of the twenty-two letters in the Phoenician alphabet ______ a single consonant sound, a phonetic economy that earlier scribal systems like cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs did not match.

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

  • A) represent
  • B) were representing
  • C) represents ✓
  • D) have represented

Explanation: "Each of" is singular even when the noun phrase that follows is plural. The subject is "each," not "letters," so the verb has to be singular. (C) "represents" agrees. (A) "represent" is the plural form, drawn into agreement with the nearer plural "letters," the standard "each of" trap. (B) "were representing" is plural past progressive, which both fails the agreement and shifts the tense out of present. (D) "have represented" is plural present perfect, again agreeing with the wrong noun.

Text
Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch developed germ theory in different directions during the 1870s and 1880s, each pursuing techniques the other never took up: while Koch refined staining and culturing methods for isolating individual bacteria, ______ developed some of the earliest laboratory-made attenuated vaccines, including the rabies vaccine first used in 1885.

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

  • A) he
  • B) the bacteriologist
  • C) Koch
  • D) Pasteur ✓

Explanation: Two named scientists sit in the sentence, and a pronoun would leave the reader unsure which one made the vaccines. The fix is to name the specific scientist. (D) "Pasteur" disambiguates and matches what the sentence already says: he is the one whose work was vaccines. (A) "he" leaves the antecedent open between Pasteur and Koch. (B) "the bacteriologist" could plausibly describe either man and so fails to single one out. (C) "Koch" contradicts the prior clause, which has just said Koch's techniques were isolation and culturing; the sentence even opens by stressing that each scientist pursued work the other did not.