ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos


English Videos 234 videos

AP English Literature and Composition 1.6 Passage Drill 5
245 Views

AP English Literature and Composition 1.6 Passage Drill 5. Death is primarily characterized as what?

AP English Literature and Composition 1.4 Passage Drill 3
515 Views

AP English Literature and Composition 1.4 Passage Drill 3. How is Burne's view of pacifism best characterized in lines 57 through 67?

AP English Literature and Composition 1.9 Passage Drill 4
259 Views

AP English Literature and Composition 1.9 Passage Drill 4. Lines 32-34 are best understood to mean what?

See All

ACT English 4.3 Passage Drill 183 Views


Share It!


Description:

ACT English: Passage Drill Drill 4, Problem 3. Which choice contains the correct tense for this sentence?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Japan.

00:08

So it also came with sushi, advanced electronics, and twisted game shows.

00:12

Check out the following passage...

00:22

How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all? created by.

00:29

And here are the potential answers...

00:34

A helpful thing to remember for this question is that all clauses need a subject and a verb.

00:40

Without these basic elements, the clause club is strictly off limits.

00:43

Choice (A), for example, creates an incomplete sentence.

00:46

The way it’s phrased renders “fortune cookies created by a Japanese man”

00:50

as the subject, without leaving any verb to tell us what these Japanese-made fortune cookies did.

00:56

(Though we figure they probably did some fortune telling.)

01:00

We have a strong feeling the verb “created” needs to function as the verb of this clause

01:04

if this sentence is ever going to be complete.

01:06

Choice (D) makes a similar mistake. The phrase “having been created by” absorbs the verb

01:12

“created,” forcing it to help describe “fortune cookies.”

01:15

If we’re going to get a complete sentence out of this deal, we need for the verb to

01:18

do its job and tell us what the fortune cookies did.

01:22

Choice (C) gets us on the right path. Adding the past tense “to be” verb “were”

01:27

finally makes “created” the verb we always knew it could be.

01:31

However, there’s a problem here with tense.

01:33

“Were being created” is in the past progressive, indicating that the creation of the cookies

01:38

was an ongoing process.

01:40

The right answer is (B), since the correct tense for this phrase is the simple past tense,

01:44

which signals that the cookies were created at a specific moment in the past

01:47

and then they stopped being created.

01:50

We would like to think fortune cookies are constantly being fine-tuned, with an eye toward

01:53

developing a super-fortune cookie that can actually predict the future, but we're not holding our breath.

Related Videos

ACT English 2.2 Punctuation
2070 Views

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 2. Where should the semi-colon be placed?

ACT English 3.1 Punctuation
1066 Views

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 1. How should this sentence be changed so that it is grammatically correct?

ACT English 3.2 Punctuation
973 Views

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 2. How should we properly hyphenate the words in this sentence?

ACT English 3.4 Punctuation
522 Views

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 3, Problem 4. Which choice best formats this list of items?

ACT English 2.1 Punctuation
519 Views

ACT English: Punctuation Drill 2, Problem 1. Which choice of punctuation best completes the sentence?