<p>Yup it's true. I took an SAT the other day, and I missed four WR questions, one of which was a lvl 1; moreover, I don't see why I got it wrong. Here it is:</p>
<p>Because our casserole was smelling surprisingly badly as it baked, the food science teacher came over to ask us what we had put in it. No error.</p>
<p>I said E: No error, and the answer is A. It sounded weird to me, but I can't pinpoint anything grammatically incorrect about it. Smelling is a verb, so what follows it should be an adverb, as badly is. Surprisingly is another adverb, which is the correct part of speech to modify another adverb--unless you can't modify adverbs?</p>
<p>There is such as a thing as surprisingly badly:
He played the song surprisingly badly.</p>
<p>A double adverb is okay, but you have to think about what the adverbs mean. In the original sentence, the adverb surprisingly is modifying bad/badly, which is okay, and bad/badly is modifying smelled. Think about it. Does something smell badly? Not really, that would mean it isn't able to smell very well. The sentence is trying to say that the casserole smelled bad, as in, not good.</p>
<p>Oh, and smelt is fine, but in american english people usually use smelled. We save smelt for referring to ores and fish.</p>
<p>they SAT does a few "they felt badly about..." and when they do that, where they put an adv. where an adj. should be, substitue 'good' for 'bad'. "They felt goodly" sounds horrible, so therefore that is the part that is wrong.</p>