<p>Peaches come in both white and yellow varieties, neither (display) the slightest hint of green when ripe.</p>
<p>A) display
B) of them displays
C) of which displays
D) has displayed
E) displayed</p>
<p>The answer is C. Can someone explain to me why A is incorrect?</p>
<p>The original sentence has a comma splice, which is grammatically incorrect in English.</p>
<p>@MITer94 The comma splice is there on purpose to get the test taker to correctly fix the problem of having a comma versus a semicolon there.</p>
<p>The answer is C because:</p>
<p>First, you have a singular subject. Neither is singular, as is either. Therefore, you need the singular verb, which has the -s ending. That eliminates A.</p>
<p>Second, you have the comma. In order to avoid the comma splice (basically, if you have two sentences that can stand on their own, you can’t put a comma between them), you need to have a transition. This eliminates D and E.</p>
<p>B is incorrect because it also creates a comma splice. Read the second part of the sentence: Neither of them displays the slightest… (it also can stand alone as a separate sentence).</p>
<p>Therefore the answer is C. If you read the sentence, it makes sense.</p>
<p>@redwall1521 Wouldn’t the subject be white/yellow varieties, making the neither plural?</p>
<p>Resolving that ambiguity is not important. You need to handle the comma splice, and only C does that.</p>
<p>No neither is actually singular. You can’t “make” it plural by what it actually talks about. And we’re talking about the subject of the participial phrase, which is the second part of the sentence.
Yes @WasatchWriter this is not important for this question but it is still important for him to understand this concept for other SAT questions or for life</p>
<p>It is true that “neither” requires a singular verb. Unfortunately, like many sample problems (and many real problems!) this one is poorly constructed, and that is where I suspect some or all of OP’s confusion lies.</p>
<p>The implication of the word “neither” is that there is exactly one white variety of peach and exactly one yellow variety. This is obviously (and intuitively) not correct; there are hundreds of varieties. The phrase “white and yellow varieties” adds to the ambiguity. It can easily be understood as meaning “white varieties and yellow varieties,” and that is in fact the reality. Even a test-taker unfamiliar with peach varieties is likely to understand it that way. “Neither” doesn’t fit into that concept, since it requires a choice between two singular items, not two “items” made of multiples.</p>
<p>What this means is that “neither of which displays” is really not correct. The phrase should be “none of which displays.” The dilemma for the test-taker is that there is no answer in which “none” is available. You’re stuck with “neither.”</p>
<p>So here’s the reality of SAT writing problems. They will sometimes contain more than one kind of error. To answer the problem “correctly,” you need to figure out which error the author of the test wants you to focus on and which error the author was not aware of making. Excellent writers are more likely to be stumped by these sentences than writers who are “only” very good.</p>