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SAT Prep Help Sentence Improvement Sample Questions Answer Explanations
1. The correct answer is (C), as the sentence should read: "The captain ordered his men to sail through the storm and his men obeyed." The original sentence is incorrect because it contains two independent clauses that are spliced together with a comma. There are a number of ways to correct this mistake; a few simple methods include substituting a coordinating conjunction such as and or but in place of the comma, adding a coordinating conjunction after the comma, changing the comma to a semicolon, or breaking the sentence into two separate sentences. For example, the following construction may be used: "The captain ordered his men to sail through the storm." This sentence might be followed by: "The captain's men obeyed." Even though there are a variety of ways to correct the mistake within this sentence, the only listed choice that corrects the mistake in the original sentence is (C), which removes the comma and replaces it with a coordinating conjunction.
2. The correct answer is choice (D). To be correct, the sentence should read: "The giant waves rocked the ship back and forth, but the ship made it through the storm unharmed." The original sentence is incorrect because it contains two independent clauses that are linked by a coordinating conjunction and a semicolon. It may appear that the phrasing of the original sentence is grammatically correct, but a semicolon can only be used in a sentence where there is a conjunctive adverb or in a sentence with no linking word at all. Since the word but is a coordinating conjunction and not a conjunctive adverb, the semicolon is being used incorrectly in this sentence. The easiest way to fix this problem is to change the semicolon to a comma. As a result, the phrasing presented by (D) corrects the mistake within the original sentence.
3. The correct answer is choice (A); there are no errors in this sentence. It may appear that the sentence has a comma splice, but this is not the case. This is because a comma splice only occurs if both clauses are independent and, in this particular case, the comma within the sentence separates the dependent clause "if the ship had arrived a day earlier" from another dependent clause, "it would have avoided the storm entirely." Clauses that begin with words such as if, when, and because are always dependent on another phrase or clause to follow next. Adverbs used in adverbial dependent clauses that precede a statement indicate that some piece of information must follow in order to complete the sentence. Therefore, the original sentence is correct and there is no reason to alter the sentence's phrasing.
4. The correct answer is (E), as the sentence should read: "As the ship approached the island, it hit the rocks on the shore." The original version of the sentence may appear to be grammatically correct, but it is actually awkward and somewhat confusing because it is written in the passive voice. This means that the direct object of the sentence (the rocks) and the action of the sentence (hit) comes before the subject of the sentence (the ship). Since sentences written in the passive voice are usually considered to be awkward or structured poorly, it is usually a good idea to revise a sentence written in the passive voice so that it uses the active voice to make a statement or convey action or meaning. As a result, this sentence should be rewritten so that the subject (the ship) comes before the action word in the sentence (hit) and the direct object (the rocks). A similar sentence, written in the active voice would read: "The ship hit the rocks."
5. The correct answer is (D), as the sentence should read "Jay used to sail with the captain every day, but now he just goes out with the captain afterwards." The original version of the sentence is incorrect because the sentence contains two clauses that are each in a different tense, and it is not clear which tense is intended. This is because the predicate "used to sail" describes an action that occurred in the past and more than once and then stopped occurring at a specific point in time. The predicate of the sentence, "and now he goes out," describes an action that the individual is still performing now. As a result, it is difficult for a reader to determine whether each action is still going on or not. To eliminate this confusion, the phrase "and, then he goes out" should be changed to another phrase that makes it clear that the change in tense is deliberate, such as "but now he just goes out."
6. The correct answer is (B). The sentence should read: "The ship was known as the Raptor, and that name struck fear into the hearts of people everywhere." The original version of the sentence is incorrect because it contains two independent clauses that are fused together without any punctuation. This type of error is very similar to a comma splice, but instead of splicing two independent clauses together with a comma, the sentence simply places the two clauses together without any punctuation at all. There are a number of different ways to correct this mistake, but the easiest way to correct the mistake is to add a comma and a coordinating conjunction such as and. This is exactly what the phrasing offered by (B) does; it corrects the error in the original version of the sentence by adding a comma and the coordinating conjunction and.