<p>Part of the following sentence is underlined; beneath the sentence are five ways of phrasing the underlined material. Select the option that produces the best sentence. If you think the original phrasing produces a better sentence than any of the alternatives, select choice A.</p>
<p>Listening to good storybooks sharpen children’s awareness and appreciation for the sounds of spoken language.
A sharpen children’s awareness
B sharpens children’s awareness of
C are what sharpens the awareness of children
D sharpens the awareness of children
E is to sharpen children’s awareness</p>
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<p>Can someone explain this question to me? I know the answer is B but i am still not sure how to tackle it in the future. Thanks.</p>
<p>What is the subject of the sentence? In this case it is "listening". That is a singular subject so it requires a singular verb. "sharpens" is singular while "sharpen" is plural. That is what makes B correct.</p>
<p>I don’t think the answer makes sense to me because of this: “…sharpens children’s awareness of and…”. The word “of” is to be followed by something else that is not “and”, isn’t it?</p>
<p>In this case, the object of the prepositional phrase is ‘the sounds’. The answer choice written correctly because it has a compound predicate, each with a different prepositional phrase. Thus, it’s sharpening ‘awareness of the sounds’ as well as ‘appreciation for the sounds’.</p>
<p>When the phrases require different function words (prepositions in this case), you can’t omit either: “awareness of” “appreciation for”. Omitting “of” would mean “awareness for”, which is non-idiomatic.</p>