A(Many) biographers B(had claimed )that
samuel langhorne clemens c(changed) his name to mark twain to echo the riverboat captain’s call ascertaining the safe D(navigation)
depth of the mississippi river.E(no error)
The answer is B…plz need explaination
I think its supposed to say “have”. The sentence says “to echo” not "echoed’ I don’t know about all of the grammatical terms but you could just google have vs. had to have a better understanding
Yes, it’s impermissible to use the superpast without another simple past action (on the SAT).
Or to look at it another way: the past perfect (the “had” form) only makes sense with reference to the simple past. There is only one verb here in the simple past (“changed”). That would mean that the biographers made their claims about Clemens before Clemens changed his name. And that is impossible.
Just out of curiosity…suppose the sentence that followed this one was something like:
“But in 1940, Sam Jones discovered letters that revealed another interpretation.”
Wouldn’t that make the first sentence completely logical and grammatical?
And is the original question from a real SAT?
Sure–and stuff like this is frequently the case! For instance, pronouns on the SAT W section need to have antecedents (with some exceptions: me/I/we/us/you, for instance), but in real writing, an antecedent can appear in a nearby sentence. Since SAT W questions are almost always stand-alone sentences, you can’t treat them as part of something bigger, especially by imagining some context that might make them unobjectionable.
I believe you, but as a math guy, I am bothered by your answer! I thought that grammatical errors on the SAT were clear and unambiguous violations of their set of tested rules. It should not be that a sentence is “conditionally wrong, depending on context”. But it sounds like you are saying that this does happen on the SAT. I wouldn’t know. That’s why I asked where the question was from.
They are clear and unambiguous within the closed system of the SAT. Sentences in the spot-the-error and improving sentences portions stand alone, as if disembodied from any potential context.
@pckeller
the original question from McGRAW-HILL’S 12 SAT PRACTICE TESTS AND PSAT .
I am not at all surprised to see that it is not from a college board test. And despite @marvin100 's reassurances, I am not convinced that this problem would pass muster with the SAT. It is just not that much of a stretch to justify this question as “no error”. But there is no point debating it…it’s another example of time wasted on fake tests. You end up debating the finer points of nothing that matters on the SAT.
Yeah, it doesn’t happen often (usually, like this sentence, there’s another verb that creates a time-reference problem), but it is an important SAT principle that each sentence must be able to stand alone without relying on context from (hypothetical) neighboring sentences.