<p>My grammar is absolutely horrid and I keep screwing this part up.</p>
<p>The ship will not leave port until every one of the crew members [have been] examined by a physician and given a clean bill of health.
a. have been
b. has been
c. had been
d. are
e. were</p>
<p>The answer is b, isn't crew members the subject so shouldn't it be plural?
I picked d, why does that not work?
~~~~~~</p>
<p>The island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa is the habitat of more than 200,000 species of plants and [animals, many are not found anywhere] else on the planet.</p>
<p>Why is it "animals, many found nowhere" rather than "animals; of which many are not found anywhere"?</p>
<p>~~~~~~
Damselflies [closely] resemble dragonflies [except that] when at rest an adult damselfly holds its wings parallel [to the[ body, while a dragonfly holds [theirs] perpendicular to the body.</p>
<p>Why is it "theirs" rather that except that? Doesn't except that sound awkward?</p>
<p>if it read “The ship will not leave port until the crew members…” then you’d be right, but it says every one, meaning the subject now becomes singular. THe real answer is B since it’s the only singular option. </p>
<p>For the second one, that’s improper use of the semi-colon. A good way to see if the semi colon works or not is take the part after the semi colon and see if it makes sense gramatically to have used it as its own separate sentence. “Of which many are not found anywhere” is a fragment.</p>
<p>For the last one, the subject of the second part of the sentence is “a dragonfly”. It should be the singlar “its” instead of the plural “theirs”. Had it said “while dragonflies hold theirs perpendicular to the body” then theirs would be properly used.</p>
<p>As for the first sentence, the subject is everyone, which is singular and so it needs a verb that matches the subject’s singularity and match the logical tense of the sentence which is choice b. so d is wrong because it is plural.</p>
<p>As for the second sentence the choice “animals; of which many are not found anywhere” is too wordy but the choice “animals, many found nowhere” is brief and contains no error, so its always better to choose the shorter choice if it contains no error.</p>
<p>In the third sentence (theirs) is the error because it is a plural pronoun that describes only one dragonfly , so the pronoun that describes it should be singular such as (it’s) . plus the choice (except that) does not contain any errors. Never rely on your ears when choosing an error , its either an error is an error if it contains any grammatical error or the sentence is no error.</p>
<p>I think you should work more on identifying the subject of the sentence before start solving, and you should also go through all the writing rules from the Barrons or sparknotes or even silverturtule’s guide, then you will be ready to start solving the writing section.</p>