A few SAT writing Q's

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1
  1. (As) adults, male golden silk spiders (live not) in webs of (their own) making but rather in webs (made by) female spiders.

I picked (made by) as wrong because I thought it ruins the parallelism of the sentence, but the answer is No Error…why???

  1. Those enrolled in the leadership training courses have evolved into dynamic, confident managers, (from an inexperienced and uncertain newcomer) just a month ago.

Well obviously the original sentence is wrong since the underlined portion should be plural. But during the test I got stuck on these two choices:
(B) from the inexperienced and uncertain newcomers they were
This is the correct answer but I thought “they were” was redundant
(D) instead of the inexperienced and uncertain newcomers of
I picked this but apparently its wrong…does it have to do with “instead” being used wrong since this a kind of “transformation”? Or maybe the “of just a month ago” part is idiomatically incorrect?

  1. The first emperor of Rome was Augustus, (and many people think that it was Julius Caesar).

For this one, I also got stuck between 2 answer choices:
© not, as many people think,
This is the correct answer but I eliminated it because I thought it was too awkward, wordy, and unnecessary
(E) but many people think it to be
I picked this because I thought it sounded right. Is it because “it” is the wrong pronoun to use? I thought “it” would refer to the position of “emperor of Rome”?

2

1): How else could you construct the ending of this sentence?"…in webs of the female spiders’ making"? No, the action (making) is still their, and agency is still attributed to the female spider and not the male. I hear that you’d like it cleaner in its finish, but this is the only way to construct the sentence.

2)Yes, evolution requires the use of “from” to properly present the change over time, and the movement away from the first condition to the second condition. So ‘B’ makes perfect sense, and is the best choice for indicating the contrast of condition through growth.

3)The answer must indicate some form of absolute rebuttal or refutation of the general thinking, not merely a linking or association of the erroneous idea to the correct idea. You want something which underscores, immediately and without room for argument, the veracity of the first part, while acknowledging succinctly that the next part must be held to be thought in concencus which is just . plain. wrong.