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AP English Language and Composition 3.9 Passage Drill 221 Views


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Description:

AP English Language and Composition 3.9 Passage Drill. Which of the following words is most grammatically parallel to "faculty" in line 23?


Transcript

00:00

[ musical flourish ]

00:02

And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by convoluted sentences.

00:07

We'd give you an example, but it'd take too long.

00:11

Illustrating the concept of convoluted... See how clever we are?

00:13

[ mumbles ] All right.

00:16

We're just gonna skim. Skim, skim, skim. And... skim.

00:19

Which of the following words is most grammatically parallel to

00:22

"faculty" in line 23? All right, where's line 23?

00:25

Right here. All right, and here are the potential answers.

00:28

[ mumbles ]

00:32

All right, well, first, we've gotta take another look at

00:34

the incredibly long and convoluted sentence from whence this line comes.

00:37

Did you like how we threw in "whence" in there?

00:40

Just trying to get into the spirit, people.

00:42

Okay, now for the sentence, right here.

00:44

Ugh. Who writes like this?

00:48

All right, uh-huh, that is definitely a wordy jungle.

00:50

Never fear, we brought a machete.

00:53

We're trying to find the answer choice that is the most similar to the word "faculty."

00:57

So let's start by figuring out what's up with that word.

01:00

If we isolate "faculty," we can see that it's a

01:03

noun being modified by the prepositional phrase "of observation."

01:07

Cool. So now we know that we're looking for another noun

01:09

that's in the same boat as "faculty."

01:12

Only one more will fit in this boat, otherwise it'll capsize.

01:14

So we better hurry up. All right, well, let's start by nixing choice B.

01:18

At their most basic, prepositional phrases

01:20

are made up of a preposition, like the word "of"

01:24

and a noun, like "observation,"

01:26

which functions as what we call the object of the preposition.

01:30

Well, in this phrase, "observation"'s

01:32

job is to help the prepositional phrase describe "faculty."

01:37

It's describing something,

01:38

not being described, so it isn't parallel to faculty.

01:41

Basically, we need another noun that's being described by a prepositional phrase.

01:45

What can we say? Some nouns just need more attention than others.

01:48

Since we know we need a noun, A is easy to eliminate.

01:51

"Dormant" is an adjective whose job it is to describe nouns.

01:55

So this one's barely worth our time.

01:57

Options D and E are both nouns, but, like "observation," they're both

02:00

objects of the preposition.

02:02

If you don't believe us, just whittle down the extra words around them. Like that.

02:05

We end up with "power of generalization" and "habit of method."

02:10

See how these nouns are parallel to "observation" and not "faculty"?

02:15

Option C is the one and only answer.

02:18

Like "faculty,"

02:19

"power" is a noun being described by a prepositional phrase.

02:22

In this case, the prepositional phrase "of generalization."

02:26

Side note: the "power of generalization"

02:28

would probably be the worst superpower ever.

02:30

On X-Men, can you imagine?

02:32

Like the guys steps up, "I have the power of generalization."

02:35

[ mumbles ]

02:38

[ rimshot ]

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