<p>Hi guys I had a question about a sat writing question I came upon while taking a practice test</p>
<p>The question was</p>
<p>In Alaska, the ground is riddled with ice wedges many quite ancient, CAUSED BY THE COLD EARTH CRACKS and the cracks fill with water.
The capitialized portion is the one that needs to be edited.
A) by the cold earth cracks
B)by the cold earth crackinge
c)when the cold earth cracks
D)where they crack the cold earth
E)through the cold earth crackling
I narrowed it down to A and C. I though A sounded kinda fishy but did not know the grammatical reason why it was wrong. The correct answer was C. Isn't the correct idiom caused by, and not caused when? Can anyone explain why a is wrong?</p>
<p>Quincy took Dan to Derek’s home FOR A VISIT(A), NEVER IMAGING(B) that five years WOULD PASS(C) before SEEING(D) Derek again. NO ERROR (E)
the correct answer is D
At first, I thought that seeing was pretty ambiguous because you could not be sure whether it was Quincy or Dan who would not see Derek. But isn’t Quincy the main subject of the first phrase, if he was, wouldn’t he be the subject of never imaging?
Can anyone explain this to me?</p>
<p>For your first writing question:
A is incorrect because the phrase ‘caused by’ implies that some thing (ie, a noun) caused the ice wedges to form. The earth cracks is a clause with a verb. the thing that causes the wedges is the process of cracking. The cracking is the thing, whereas in the original sentence they are treating the word ‘cracks’ as a verb, and not the plural of the noun crack.</p>
<p>For your second question: Process of Elimination
A) for a visit. Nothing wrong here, you can take people places for a visit all the time!
B) Never imagining- describes Quincy’s state as he drove Derek to Dan’s house. All the time he was taking him, not one time was he imagining something would happen like that.
C) would pass- nothing wrong. We are talking about the future in the past here- ie from that time in the past, five years will pass before they meet again. When you describe the future from the past you use the conditional.
D) SEEING- SO! Since we are describing the future from the past, it should be WOULD SEE him. “Five years would pass before he would see him again.”</p>
<p>Using the gerund implies he is currently in the act of doing something. He clearly isn’t in the act of seeing Derek again because those five years haven’t passed. We are still in the moment where he took Derek to the house, and while he was doing that he was never imagining, but he wasn’t seeing him again!</p>