<p>The company's sponsorship of charitable foundations and mentorship programs HAVE garnered many many commendations from philanthropic organizations.</p>
<p>i thought that "HAVE" is correct because the subjects were "sponsorship" and "mentorship".
however, my prep book says that "sponsorship" is the subject, thus "have" is changed to "has"</p>
<p>am i correct? or is the prep book correct?</p>
<p>I believe it’s has. You’re reading it wrong I think. It’s "The company’s sponsorship of charitable foundations and [of] mentorship programs has garnered many commendations from philanthropic organizations.</p>
<p>Alright look at it this way:</p>
<p>“The company’s sponsorship <a href=“has/have”>**of ** charitable foundations and mentorship programs</a> garnered many commendations from philanthropic organizations.”</p>
<p>The “of” is key here. “Of” is a preposition, which preludes a prepositional phrase. The preposition “Of” has two objects, foundations and programs. Charitable and mentorship are just adjectives. Therefore, the prepositional phrase is acting as an adjectival phrase, saying "Which sponsorship? The sponsorship of charitable foundations and mentorship programs. So, in the end, the subject is sponsorship, which requires the singular verb “has”.</p>
<p>Hope that helped! If you want any other help or further explanations, p/m me.</p>
<p>As dreamsofivy stated, just take away the extra junk of the sentence. You can do this with nearly every sentence. By doing so, it makes it much easier to figure out the correct usage.
By the way, it’s grammar. :)</p>
<p>Yup yup. The key to all SAT writing questions is eliminating the useless stuff.</p>
<p>Likewise, the goal of the SAT writing question writers is to put in a whole bunch of useless stuff to trick you.</p>
<p>The subject is never in a prepositional phrase, so learn your prepositions.</p>