PSAT Writing — verbs: which subject, which tense, which form

Verbs carry more of the Standard English Conventions domain than anything else, and they are the most learnable part of it, because every question has a rule behind it that can be stated in one line. This material is twelve sentences, each missing a verb, in the three groups the test uses.

Five turn on agreement, and in every one of them the noun nearest the blank is the wrong noun. A collection of specimens is one collection. A series of lectures is one series, an s on the end notwithstanding. A sentence beginning "Among the various artifacts recovered from the shipwreck site" puts its subject after the verb, where it is easy to miss. A board of directors is singular in American usage, whatever the number of people on it. And with neither-nor, the verb agrees with the subject standing nearer to it, which here is the plural one. The habit worth building is mechanical: cross out everything between two commas, and everything beginning with a preposition, and see what is left.

Four turn on tense, and in each case something already in the sentence settles it. A stated year forces the simple past and rules out the present perfect. "By the time the rescue team reached the base" announces that something was already finished, which is what the past perfect is for. "While" joins two things happening at once, and the other clause is in the past. A stretch of time running up to a past moment, rather than up to today, takes the past perfect progressive.

Three turn on form. A participle cannot be the main verb of a sentence, however natural it sounds after a long relative clause. An unreal condition about the past pairs "had" plus a participle in the if-clause with "could have been" in the other, and each half tells you what the other must be. And some verbs take an infinitive where others take a gerund, which is a fact about the individual verb rather than a rule you can reason out: "agree" takes the infinitive.

Every explanation names the subject in so many words, says what in the sentence fixes the tense or the form, and gives each wrong option its own reason — agreement with the wrong noun, a tense the stated time rules out, a participle where a finite verb is needed. Nothing here rests on a distinction careful writers dispute: there is no singular-they agreement test and no subjunctive question. All the sentences were written for this exercise, and nothing is reproduced from any published test.

• Find the true subject of a verb by discarding prepositional phrases and relative clauses
• Handle an inverted sentence, where the subject follows the verb
• Treat a collective noun as singular, as American usage does
• Apply the neither-nor rule: the verb agrees with the nearer subject
• Let a stated year, a time phrase or the neighboring clause decide the tense instead of guessing at it
• Recognize the two places a past perfect is required: one past action before another, and a stretch of time ending at a past moment
• Tell a finite verb from a participle, and know why only the first can run a sentence
• Complete an unreal condition about the past, matching had plus a participle with could or would have been

All twelve sentences were written for this exercise; each stands alone and each is missing exactly one verb. A sample of what has to be read past: "The collection of rare botanical specimens from the remote islands of the Pacific ____ on display"; "Among the various artifacts recovered from the shipwreck site ____ a golden compass that still turns freely in its mount"; "Neither the lead researcher nor the laboratory assistants ____ aware of the equipment fault"; "By the time the rescue team reached the mountain base, the snowstorm ____ the main access road completely"; "Astronomers ____ the atmosphere of the planet for nearly three decades before the first clear trace of methane appeared"; and "If the engineer ____ the cracked support before the winter, the collapse of the footbridge could have been avoided entirely." Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the PSAT/NMSQT, and it is not an exam centre.