<p>The SAT question of the day for Dec. 27 is egregiously ungrammatical. It is, of course, missing a "That" in the beginning. It's kind of unsettling to find mistakes like this being sent out to thousands of test-prepping students!</p>
<p>Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole. </p>
<p>The edelweiss appears to be ------- is an illusion: the flower actually is incredibly -------, able to survive in extreme temperatures.</p>
<pre><code>(A) hardy . . malleable
(B) fragile . . resilient
(C) durable . . resistant
(D) stunning . . slight
</code></pre>
<p>answer is (B) fragile . . resilient</p>
<p>There’s no grammatical mistake. The sentence is perfectly fine.</p>
<p>Is English your 2nd language?</p>
<p>This post appears to be cheesy is an illusion: the post is actually cheddar, able to be eaten without barf.</p>
<p>Yeah, no. Not grammatically correct.</p>
<p>This sentence is indeed grammatically incorrect. “appears” should be “appearing”. Therefore it is wrong.</p>
<p>If you want to be unsettled, work through the Kaplan or Princeton Review SAT books. In comparison, this sort of error is almost trivial.</p>
<p>SATTackle has the right fix. Changing it to “appearing” won’t work. The stuff in front of the comma has to be an independent clause.</p>
<p>Yes, but while it might be a trivial error, thousands of students get significant points taken off their SAT writing section scores for not recognizing errors of equal or even less triviality. Just saying!</p>
<p>Wow! This is my first time posting here, so perhaps I wrongly expected a higher level of discussion. But I’m kind of surprised by Master Yster’s response. English is not my second language, but I have, in fact, found that many students for whom English is a second language have a much better grasp of English grammar than some students for whom it is the first language!</p>
<p>I agree with you that it’s annoying, SATtackle, and you are of course correct that the first “The” should be “That.” There are occasionally errors in the SAT itself, although grammatical errors are not frequent. In the CR section of a PSAT some years ago, Marie Curie was described as a “French scientist,” which greatly irritated QMP who regards Marie Curie as one of the greatest Polish scientists since Copernicus. The trick is to let it go, if you encounter a problem like this on the real SAT–and re-reading has persuaded you that you didn’t misread the question or accidentally read it with eyes crossed.</p>
<p>Have you sent a message to CB about the error?</p>