<p>(A) BEHIND the stage (B)WERE the props, dressing rooms, rack of costumes, </p>
<p>and (C) A PLACE for all of </p>
<p>the actors and actresses (D) TO RELAX AND REST between acts. (E) NO ERROR.</p>
<hr>
<p>"b. When the subject of the sentence (stage) follows
the verb, the verb still takes its number from the
subject. Because stage is singular, the verb needs
to be singular, too. Were should be was."</p>
<p>Can somebody explain to me why is this so, please?</p>
<p>The explanation is wrong. Stage is not the subject of the sentence. The subjects are props, dressing rooms, rack, and place</p>
<p>I thought the same thing!
Thanks for the response!</p>
<p>yeah the answer is C</p>
<p>Why is it C?</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, where did you get this question?</p>
<p>Lockclock, why is it C? “A place for all of the actors and actresses to relax” looks right to me</p>
<p>Can you please explain what is wrong with “C” ?</p>
<p>I think there is no error</p>
<p>its either c or e, c could have problems with parallelism and if not, theres no error. wait for crazy or silver to answer this.</p>
<p>Guys it should be “C” because C messes up the parallelism… it should read “behind the stage were the props,dressing rooms, rack of costumes, and place for all the actors”</p>
<p>^ im not sure that makes sense… i think the “a” has to be there? or not…actually your conjecture makes sense…so idk its either C or E.</p>
<p>well i think it would make more sense if I omitted all the prepositional phrases and kinda changed the positioning so that it reads: “the props, rooms, rack, and place were behind the stage”</p>
<p>the OP didn’t make it clear which part was highlighted or not… i don’t think you can change all of those.</p>
<p>Either C or E. Not sure what is/isn’t highlighted.</p>
<p>Because of potential parallelism errors, I believe C to be the right answer; however, I’m not 100% sure.</p>
<p>The answer is E. C is perfectly parallel.</p>
<p>yeah thats what my thought was ^. if this was a question towards the end of a section, i would lean even more towards E. and is this even from a CB test?</p>
<p>The only error I see is “RACK” of costumes. It should be ‘racks of costumes’ or ‘a rack of costumes’. Since that wasn’t one of the choices, I would have marked E.</p>
<p>If some think the answer should be C to preserve parallelism, they may be making the mistake of thinking that all the other elements of the compound subject are plural so ‘place’ must be plural as well. The subject is a list. That is what makes it plural. The things listed don’t have to all be plural if, in fact, some of the items on the list are singular. A place (and a rack) can be singular if there was really only one place for the actors etc. and only one rack for costumes. (PS…‘costumes’ does not make rack plural.)</p>
<p>garfieldliker is right, ‘stage’ is not the subject. It is the object of the preposition ‘behind’. All in all, this was a bogus question.</p>
<p>exactly why i wondered if it was a ETS problem or not…</p>
<p>One more thought…</p>
<p>gregbob seems to be focusing on the use of articles (a, an and the) as the source of parallelism. I think that is overthinking it, frankly. Since a single article, ‘the’, introduces ‘props, dressing rooms’ , greg may be arguing that the other elements of the subject list should follow in kind and be written without articles as well. I would disagree, not because I don’t think parallelism could be achieved by introducing all elements of the list with appropriate articles, but because I think the result would be too wordy and might even be distracting. (were the props, the dressing rooms, the rack, and the place) Greg’s suggestion that all the articles should be dropped is possible also (were the props, dressing rooms, rack of costumes and place for the actors to relax). Even so, parallelism is a literary device, not a grammatical requirement, just as the use of metaphor or of other devices is not required. And, there are several options for parallelism in every situation. There is nothing grammatically wrong with ‘a place’. In my mind, it helps to make a transition from plural to singular items in the list. Maybe that’s why I would have also preferred ‘a rack… and a place…’.</p>
<p>NspiredOne,</p>
<p>I’m with you. I’d like to know where this came from as well.</p>
<p>411 SAT
ESSAY PROMPTS
AND WRITING
QUESTIONS
2006
Learning Express
New York</p>
<p>If this question is all that wrong, does this mean I should stop using this book?</p>