<p>Here is an SAT question that I find confusing. It is in the grammar section and it is a "find the error" question:</p>
<p>(Along) the curve of islands known as the Florida Keys (lies) a reef of living coral, (the only one) of (a kind) in the continental United States. (No Error)</p>
<p>The answer is (a kind), but I'm not sure why. Can anyone clear this up for me?</p>
<p>Cheers,
Brian</p>
<p>It's a redundancy error.
The only one..of a kind.. you don't need both of them..just saying the only one in the continental US..</p>
<p>it can't be redundancy, because even if you removed "a kind" from the sentence entirely, you'd be left with</p>
<p>"the only one of in the continental united states"</p>
<p>the error is that the correct expression is "the only one of its kind." which question number was this?</p>
<p>thank you. so its a misuse of the expression, correct?</p>
<p>and this was question #16.</p>
<p>xitammarg: oh really? thanks for correcting me. =] Well it sounded like a redundancy error. I guess it's an idiom error? ugh. I always have trouble with those. lol</p>
<p>sorry, which page is it number 16 on?</p>
<p>you can say "one of a kind" in other situations. both "one of a kind" and "one of its kind" are basically the anglicized versions of the latin expression "sui generis" (roughly, "of its own kind"). you might say, for example, "harvard is one of a kind when it comes to academics" OR "when it comes to academics, harvard is the only school of its kind" (neither sentence would ever appear on the SAT, by the way, because of the idiom "when it comes to").</p>
<p>on a basic level, the difference here is whether the words "the only" appears before the word "one." a thing can be "one of a kind" or it can be "the only one of its kind." i'm simplifying, but you get the point.</p>
<p>no problem, its on page 479 of CollegeBoard's "The Official SAT Study Guide".</p>
<p>do you have the book?</p>
<p>no problem :) sorry if i sounded harsh--i didn't mean to.</p>
<p>with the exception of one online question, which i think was an outlier, i've never seen a real CB ISE question in which the correct answer required you to delete the entire answer choice from the sentence. in other words, if the fault with the sentence was that you should remove "of a kind" from the sentence entirely, then the underlined section of the sentence for that answer choice would have to include more than just the phrase "of a kind"--it would have to be at least "one of a kind" or "of a kind in," in this case.</p>
<p>either way, though, in this case the "of" wasn't underlined.</p>
<p>yup. not at hand at the moment, but when it comes back i'll look up the question. thanks--</p>
<p>thanks a lot for helping me out. =)</p>