It is well known that parrots can imitate human speech. But can parrots really communicate through language like they do?
A)no change
B like them
C as they can do
D the way humans can
E as a human
would as a human can be correct if it were an answer choice?
I thought that ‘like’ compares nouns and ‘as’ compares verbs so I was leaning toward choice E. As of now, I still don’t understand why D is the correct answer. Can someone explain the grammar?And why is A wrong?
a) is wrong because the word “they” is ambiguous in terms of the context of the sentence. It may seem obvious that “they” refers to humans, but they is ambiguous as it can refer to the parrots or humans.
e) is wrong because it kind of implies that parrots are doing something “as a human”, but they’re not humans, they’re parrots
the only one I see that makes sense is D
It’s a pronoun error, not an idiom error. “They” has no antecedent–“human speech” is singular. E breaks parallelism because it has no verb–now you might think the verb is implied/omitted as a parallel structure with “communicate,” but that doesn’t work because you can’t say “as a human communicate” and if you change the verb form you can no longer omit it as part of a parallel structure. In that way, E is like “I never have and never will eat pork”–if you put the verb back in it reads “I never have [eat] and never will eat pork,” which is wrong and must be corrected to “I never have [eaten] and never will eat pork.”
@marvin100
But can parrots really communicate through language[ ] the way humans can?
I feel as if there should be a word in the brackets.
“Feeling” is a bad method for solving SAT grammar questions. In fact, the grammar portion of the test is specifically designed to thwart your “ear” or grammar “intuition.”
A is incorrect because “they” is vague.
And it seems like there should be a “like” in the bracket, right? That’s our common language actually biting us in the rear. A lot of times (and especially on these types of tests), having a “like” or even a “that” somewhere is not grammatically correct. The whole deal with the SAT and ACT is brevity. They want the shortest answer that makes the most sense.
D easily satisfies that.