Four rules, one question
Answering four different conventions questions by asking the same thing each time: what is this sentence about?
Passage
Four sentences, each about the same excavation, and each with one blank.
(1) The trench, along with two smaller soundings, ___ opened in April.
(2) Neither the finds report nor the site notebooks ___ been catalogued.
(3) Recorded in ink and never digitised, ___
(4) When the archaeologist showed the notebooks to the conservator, ___ noticed the water damage.
Answers in order, explanations withheld, and a report on where the chain broke.
- 39.1Subject-verb agreementStandard
Which choice belongs in sentence 1?
- Awas
- Bwere
- Chave been
- Dare
Show the answer and reasoningHide the reasoning
was
The subject is "The trench", singular. "Along with two smaller soundings" adds information without adding a subject, in the same way "as well as" and "together with" do.
- 39.2Subject-verb agreementStandard
Builds on: Question 1 answered singular. This one answers plural, and the point is that neither was decided by what sounded right: both were decided by locating the subject.
Which choice belongs in sentence 2?
- Ahas
- Bhave
- Cis
- Dwas
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have
With "neither... nor" the verb matches the subject nearer to it, and that is "the site notebooks", which is plural. Swapping the two nouns would make "has" correct — a quick way to check.
- 39.3ModifiersStandard
Builds on: Questions 1 and 2, which both turned on identifying the subject. A dangling modifier is that failure in another form — the phrase attaches to whatever arrives first, not to what it means.
Which choice completes sentence 3?
- Athe conservator found the notebooks hard to read.
- Bthe notebooks were hard for the conservator to read.
- Creading the notebooks was difficult.
- Dit was hard to read them.
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the notebooks were hard for the conservator to read.
What was recorded in ink and never digitised is the notebooks, so the notebooks have to follow the comma. The same question as before, asked about a phrase instead of a verb: which noun is this about?
- 39.4Pronoun clarityChallenge
Builds on: The whole set. Each sentence has been decided by naming what it is about; here the fix is literally to name it, because English gives no pronoun that can pick out one of two singular people.
Which choice completes sentence 4 so that its reference is clear?
- Athey
- Bshe
- Cthe conservator
- Dthat person
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the conservator
Two people appear in the first clause, so any pronoun has two possible antecedents and the sentence stops saying who noticed. Naming one settles it.