GED and HiSET language arts — grammar, usage and punctuation

Half of the language arts test is not reading at all. It is editing: a passage arrives with faults already in it, and the work is to see the fault and pick the repair. This set is twelve of those, one fault each, with the faulty sentence printed in full and four candidate repairs quoted in the options — not described, quoted, so that choosing means reading the actual punctuation rather than a label for it.

The faults are the ones that recur. A fragment that begins with "because" and never arrives at its main clause. Two complete sentences fused with nothing between them — and, as a distractor, the same two joined by "then", which looks like a repair and is not, because "then" is an adverb and cannot join anything. A pronoun with two possible owners standing right beside each other. A verb tense that changes in the middle of one sentence. "Only" in the wrong slot, which is the whole misplaced-modifier problem in one word: "the office only accepts cash on Fridays" has several meanings and the rewrite has to choose one. An opening phrase with nobody to attach to, so that the files appear to be walking into the office. Its and it's, both wrong in the same sentence, so the fix is to swap them rather than replace both. The apostrophe in a plural possessive. Their and they're next to affect and effect. The comma after a long opening element, and the pair of commas around a clause that could be lifted out.

One item the exams like is deliberately absent. Pronoun-antecedent agreement is usually taught with "every employee must submit their timecard", and singular "their" is now standard enough in American usage that a candidate could defend it in front of an examiner. Rather than mark a defensible sentence wrong, the slot went to subject-verb agreement across "neither ... nor", where the rule is unambiguous: the verb follows whichever half of the subject sits nearer to it.

Every explanation says why each wrong version is wrong, since in editing questions the near-miss is the whole lesson. Answer positions are spread evenly across the bank.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with GED Testing Service, which owns the GED test, or with the HiSET program, and it is not a test centre. Nothing here reproduces any official test material.

• Recognize a sentence fragment and attach it to the clause it depends on
• Repair a fused sentence, and see why an adverb like "then" does not join two clauses
• Remove an ambiguous pronoun reference without changing who did what
• Keep verb tense consistent within a sentence
• Place "only" so that it limits the thing you mean it to limit
• Give a dangling modifier a subject that can perform the action
• Choose between its and it's, and place the apostrophe in a plural possessive
• Punctuate a long introductory element and a nonessential clause, and make a verb agree across neither/nor

Written for this exercise. From the bank: "The clinic says its moving it's walk-in desk to the second floor." Both forms are wrong and the repair is to exchange them, not to replace both — read "it is" into each slot in turn, and only the first one survives the test.