<p>(During A) the long sleepless night before the battle the two soldiers, who (were B) friends since high school, talked about (what C) they (were going D) to do after the war.
The answer supposed to be (B), but I dont get why.</p>
<p>(During A) the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, the former relied on a three prong approach (to deterring B) Soviet aggression through the threat of a nuclear counter attack. (No Error E)
For this question, I think that (B) is wrong since "to" cannot followed by a verb ended with ing, but the answer says (E). WHY??? T_T</p>
<p>First of all, are these REAL college board questions?</p>
<p>The first one has an error because there is a bit of tense confusion. To clarify, you probably need to change “were friends” to “had been friends”. The clarification is needed because the sentence can be interpretted in two different ways…
A: the students talked about what they were going to do after the war
**** OK I DONT KNOW. IT SEEMS RIGHT, AND THIS PROBABLY ISNT A COLLEGE BOARD QUESTION.</p>
<p>Also, for the second sentence, i think you made up that rule because it DOESNT EXIST HOIHOIHOIHOI but B is incorrect because the word should be in the infinitive form.</p>
<p>gawddd i suck at grammar… but im guessing these arent real college board stuufs</p>
<p>dougiezmd, you are way better than me in grammar, i suck in english </p>
<p>and MITer94, these questions were from a SAT practice book called “Barron’s 6 SAT practice test”, there are so many questions that don’t make any sense at all. i’m so confused… >.<, by the way that is an interesting user name, you want to go to MIT??</p>
<p>Yea, I’ve seen some badly written test preparation books. I never used Barron’s so I can’t really say much about it, but it’s a good idea to read reviews before buying test prep books.</p>
<p>“Approach to deterring” is perfectly correct. “To” serves as a preposition here and “deterring” is a gerund noun. </p>
<p>When stuck, think about it using different words. The sentence, “I modified my approach to studying for the SAT after my first disastrous score,” is a correct, similar construct.</p>
<p>Given what they’ve provided you (which in the first case is a poorly constructed sentence under the best of circumstances), these should look like this:</p>
<p>First sentence:</p>
<p>During the long sleepless night before the battle the two soldiers, who HAD BEEN friends since high school, talked about what they were going to do after the war.</p>
<p>The second one is correct. To tell you “why” it’s correct would require a brief course in grammar. I will say this: your assumption that “‘to’ cannot followed by a verb ended with –ing” isn’t always true. Verbs can function in lots of ways.</p>
<p>If you look around this site long enough you’ll find that there’s a general consensus that the Blue Book tests and other CB tests are most helpful</p>
<p>Yeah, be cautious of test prep materials. My AP calculus teacher once gave us all a practice test from Kaplan, which I thought was a waste of paper since there were so many mistakes. Most of us ended up not doing the test.</p>
<p>Ninjabunny, I cannot comment on the quality of various prep materials. But I can tell you that as far as English grammar goes, what jkjeremy and I posted is correct. </p>
<p>(My BA is in English Lang, I taught writing for several years, I won writing awards in undergrad and law school, I have published a short story and over 15 articles and I am currently a lawyer who writes for a living, if that helps give you any confidence in my answer.)</p>
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