<p>brackets = underlined portion</p>
<p>[Having minimal exposure] to poetry when they [attended] school, most Americans [choose] to watch television or [to read] popular magazines for entertainment. [No error]</p>
<p>I put D (To Read) because I thought it was parallel faulty but apparently the correct answer is C (Choose). I was thinking tense error but i'm not sure. Any help? Thanks!</p>
<p>C is right because it should be 'chose' because the sentence is in the past tense (they attended high school).</p>
<p>make sure when you pick a choice, you are able to fix it and make the sentence correct</p>
<p>What confused me initially was the very first part: [Having minimal exposure] to poetry. That part seems pretty sound but it kind of clogged up the sentence because another underline was right next to it, so I tried just cutting it out.</p>
<p>If you take that part out, the sentence reads:
When they [attended] school, most Americans [choose] to watch television or [to read] popular magazines for entertainment. </p>
<p>It's pretty clear here that the [choose] is wrong. </p>
<p>I guess the lesson is to remove (if possible) some parts of the sentence which you know are correct, or even to play with the choices, to break it down for irregularities. This is basically the rule for subject verb agreement, particularly when a clause is inserted between the subject and verb, but I find it helps in this, too. Hope this helps.</p>
<p>The real problem with the question is the answer could be "a," "b" or "c" and thus it is a bad question. If "Having minimal exposure" and "attended" are correct then "choose" must become "chose," but "choose" would be correct if you just changed the first phrase to "Having had minimal exposure." Likewise choose would be correct if you just changed "attended" to "attend."</p>
<p>yeah, C stood out to me and that's what I would say, but really it could be B also... def a bad question!</p>
<p>well it couldnt be B because if there was something wrong with B then you would also have to correct A. The right choice involves only one correction, not 2.</p>
<p>Bad question. The meaning isn't clear. Taking out "having minimal exposure to poetry" is not the right strategy because "when they attended school" is NOT when (the same time) they were choosing to watch TV--it is when (the time that) they had the minimal exposure to poetry--the later result of which was that they chose/choose to watch TV. So you can't take that out without totally changing the meaning of the sentence. It is not clear if they are doing the choosing in the present or in general as would be indicated by the present tense "choose" (makes more sense in context--but you'd need "having HAD" to go with that) or in the past--seems to make less sense and would only fit in a narrow context. Did this come out of a paragraph that would make the intended meaning clear--like a report on Americans' TV watching during a certain period in history? . . seems too tricky and unlikely. (Must be SAT practice) Not fair. But technically a tense error. Any other English teachers out there? Skip it and move on.</p>
<p>Key to any writing section question: READ CAREEEEFULLY</p>
<p>Yep, Drusba's post says it all. The context is irrelevant because it would not change or somehow correct the problem with the tenses.</p>
<p>a related question:</p>
<p>but if you put the word "now" or any other synonymous words after "Americans" and before "choose", then "choose" would be in the correct tense, right?</p>
<p>No that doesn't correct the sentence because you would still have to change either [a] or **.</p>