<p>Whether the ancient Egyptian actually sailed or did not to South America remains uncertain, but Heyerdahl's Ra II expedition demonstrated that they could have done so.</p>
<p>Why the answer is "That the ancient Egyptians actually sailed", but not "The actuality of the sailing by ancient Egyptians".</p>
<p>The official definitions are:
The correct one:
[quote]
"It avoids the redundancy of the original by using a subordinate clause introduced by "that" as the subject of the verb phrase "remains uncertain.""
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The second one is incorrect for
[quote]
"incorrectly shifts the subject of the first clause to "actuality," making the structure of the second clause unparallel with no clear referent for "they.""
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I am a little confused and I think the latter can also make the reference clear.</p>
<p>yeah, technically the "the actuality of the sailing..." is correct grammar, but really, it sounds hopelessly awkward. You have two objects of prepositions in the subject clause, for one thing. "The actuality of the sailing"? It sounds like a student who is trying to increase their word count.</p>
<p>Much of the sentence corrections are a matter of style. Not all of the options necessarily icontain incorrect grammar. What I did on the writing section was to read each option to myself and try to picture the sentence in print in a novel, and that was my best section.</p>
<p>The sentence structure is wrong because it's not parallel. When "actuality" becomes the subject of the clause, rather than Egyptians being the subject of the clause, "they" should become "it", like so:</p>
<p>"The actuality of the sailing by ancient Egyptians to South America remains uncertain, but the sailing by the Ra II expedition demonstrated that it is possible."</p>
<p>Additionally, if the sentence is written as:
"The actuality of the sailing by ancient Egyptians to South America remains uncertain, but Heyerdahl's Ra II expedition demonstrated that they could have done so" (using the second as the correct answer), note that the first clause is using the passive verb while the second is using the active verbs. These, too, should be parallel.</p>
<p>"egyptians" is the subject neither of the original sentence nor of the corrected version; those subjects are "whether" and "that," respectively.</p>
<p>also, with the "actuality of the sailing" version of the sentence, the main verbs (indeed the only verbs) are "remains," "demonstrated," and "could have done," which are all in the active voice. "sailing" is a gerund, and not a passive-voice verb.</p>
<p>note also that the quoted explanation in the original post says that the problem with the original sentence is the redundancy of "whether" with "or did not." the explanation finds nothing wrong with a lack of parallelism in the original sentence. and, for that matter, using "that" doesn't add any parellelism to the sentence--what two structures are parallel?</p>
<p>this is just another example of a bad explanation by the college board. from a strategy perspective, remember that, all other things being equal, the SAT idiosyncratically prefers to avoid the word "by" in sentences it considers well-written. you won't go wrong with that.</p>
<p>by the way, OP--what did you dislike about the "that . . ." option that kept you from picking it in the first place?</p>