SAT — verbs, agreement and sentence structure

Ten sentences, each with a blank and four forms to choose between, and one for each of the rules this half of the domain tests. Unlike the punctuation questions in the companion material, these can use the real test's own format: "was", "were", "has been" and "have been" are four different words, so nothing is lost in translation.

The agreement questions are built around the four situations in which the ear gives the wrong answer. A subject separated from its verb by two prepositional phrases leaves a plural noun sitting immediately before the blank, and deleting everything from "of" onward is what settles it. A subject that follows its verb, in a sentence opening "Among the various artifacts", hides behind an inversion. A compound subject joined by "nor" takes its number from whichever element is nearer, which is a rule with no logic behind it and has to be known. And a collective noun takes the singular when the body acts as one — a committee issuing a single report — with the sentence's own later "its" confirming it. That last question carries a note worth reading: where a sentence describes the members acting separately rather than the body acting together, the plural becomes defensible, and the distinction is real rather than pedantic.

The rest cover what the domain calls form and structure. A tense question sets "currently" against a clause about the previous year. A participle question uses an irregular verb, because with a regular one the participle and the simple past are the same word and there is no question to ask; the test is whether a form could stand alone after the subject with no helper, and if it could, it is the simple past and does not belong after "had". A pronoun question turns on "series", singular however many lectures it contains, with the plural sitting right beside the blank to tempt agreement. A case question puts a pronoun in a compound object, where the more formal-sounding form is the wrong one. A modifier question makes the blank supply the subject that the opening phrase has to describe. And a parallelism question puts the blank third in a list of three verbs.

Every explanation names the rule, points at the words in the sentence that trigger it — the true subject, the antecedent, the other items in the list — and says what a reader would have been thinking to choose each wrong form. Every person, institution and firm in these sentences is invented. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication, released test, practice test, question bank or scoring guideline.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the SAT, and it is not an exam center.

• Find the true subject by deleting the prepositional phrases between it and the verb
• Locate a subject that follows its verb in an inverted sentence
• Apply the proximity rule to a compound subject joined by or or nor
• Treat a collective noun as singular when the body acts as one, and know when the plural is defensible
• Keep tense consistent across a sentence that names two different times
• Use the past participle after have or had, and recognize the simple past by whether it can stand alone
• Match a pronoun to a singular antecedent that has a plural noun sitting next to it
• Choose the pronoun case a compound object requires rather than the form that sounds formal
• Supply the subject that an opening participial phrase must describe
• Match the grammatical form of the other items in a list or comparison

"The planning committee _________ its report to the board every spring, and the board publishes a summary of it in June." Which choice completes the writer's sentence so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?