Act English - Basic Preview

Because the sentence began with the past tense form with "finished," you want to stay within the same tense for the rest of the sentence, so "played" would be correct.

FANBOYS is an easy way to remember some very important "conjunctions." A conjunction is a word that joins parts of a sentence; the most common ones are "and," "but, " and "or." It is very important to learn what FANBOYS stands for, because there is a very important comma rule involving FANBOYS conjunctions.

Words that compare two things, called comparitives, usually end in -er, like "bigger" or "stronger." Words that compare more than two things are called superlatives, and usually end in -est. Here we only have two things to compare, the tortoise and the hare, so "faster" would be correct.

Phrases that are just standard to the English language are called "idioms." For some reason, it just sounds right to say "stop by the post office" rather than "stop for the post office" or "stop to the post office." The key for these is to trust your ear; if you think it sounds wrong, then the phrasing probably needs to be changed!

The subject is a person or thing which is the main "doer" in the sentence, and the verb is the main action being done. You need a subject and a verb in order to make a complete sentence! Without one of these two elements, the sentence is incomplete.

The sentence needs a comma to be placed between "movie" and "we," because it shows the separation between the introductory dependent clause "Before we watch the movie" and the following independent clause, "we have to make popcorn."

The subject of the sentence, "one student," is singular, so the apostrophe should go before the "s" to show that it's "one student's request."

The question tests your knowledge of something called the appositives comma rule. An "appositive" is extra information that could be removed from the sentence 1) without messing up the grammar of the sentence and 2) without losing any essential information. The appositive in this sentence is "a black and white Great Dane" because without it, the sentence would read "Our dog is almost the size of a small pony," which is still a complete sentence and we get the main point. In order to indicate that a part of the sentence is an appositive, we have to put commas before and after it.

If it was just one cheerleader, the apostrophe would go before the "s" and become "cheerleader's." However, because there are multiple cheerleaders, the apostrophe goes after the "s" and becomes "cheerleaders'." The position of the apostrophe is key, because we should always be able to locate the apostrophe and look to the left of it to identify whether the subject is singular or plural. In the previous question we were given "student's", so everything to the left of the apostrophe is "student." Therefore, we know it's singular, or just one student. In this question we ended up with "cheerleaders'," because we can look to the left of the apostrophe and see "cheerleaders," so we know it's plural, or multiple cheerleaders.

"Its'," with an apostrophe after the "s" like that, doe not exist. If you see this anywhere, just know that it is wrong. The reason is that "it" is always singular and has no plural form; you cannot have multiple "its."

The part of the sentence before the comma is not a complete sentence and cannot stand on its own, so it is a dependent clause. Consider that if someone just said "Before I could go to the concert!" we would think that there was more they meant to say! The part of the sentence after the comma is a complete sentence ("I had to make sure that all my schoolwork was done.") and could stand independently from the rest, so it is an independent clause.

A "clause" is a fancy English word for a part of a sentence. For rules of grammar, it is extremely important to be able to identify, within a sentence, which clauses are independent and which clauses are dependent. An independent clause is a part of a sentence that, if you removed it from the current sentence it was in and made it its own sentence, it would be a complete sentence. It's independent, so it can be complete all by itself! A dependent clause is a part of a sentence that, if you removed it from its current sentence and put it by itself, it would be an incomplete sentence. It's dependent, so it depends on another clause in order to be complete. For example, consider the sentence "If we want to get through the rest of this quiz, these explanations have to get shorter." The independent clause is "these explanations have to get shorter" because it's a complete sentence, and the dependent clause is "if we want to get through the rest of this quiz" because it cannot stand alone.

Be careful! Sometimes you get so caught up on thinking about where to put apostrophes that you forget to think about whether or not you need one! Apostrophes are used to show possession; in the above sentence, there is no possession going on. "The lawyers" is plural; there are multiple lawyers, but they aren't claiming ownership of anything, so no apostrophe is necessary.

The correct place for a comma is between "home" and "so" because "so" is one of the FANBOYS conjunctions, and if you remove the "so" you can see that there are two complete sentences on either side of the conjunction ("He left his wallet at home" and "he had no idea how he was going to pay for lunch").

In this sentence, we have an example of something called "parallel structures." If you remember from math class, "parallel" means something that runs similarly side by side. In this case, we apply the idea of parallelism to the way the verbs are set up in a list. The sentence sets up the parallel verb structures of "swimming" and "barbecuing," so for the third activity that goes in the blank we want something that follows the same pattern; we need a verb that ends in -ing. The first three options all meet this criteria ("sleeping," "stressing," and "going"), and the last option is the only one that doesn't ("to visit" rather than "visiting").

No comma is necessary in this sentence. Students will often see the "and" and think, the FANBOYS rule says we need a comma before the "and"! However, they forget that it's important that we have two independent clauses on either side of the FANBOYS conjunction. To check for this, try removing the "and" and reading the two clauses separately. It becomes clear that "I plan to go to Belize" is an independent clause, but "swim with sharks" is not! Since that criteria of the FANBOYS rule isn't met, we cannot put a comma in the sentence.

"The team members" is the main subject because it is the subject of the independent clause in the sentence. "They" is part of the dependent clause at the beginning, so it can't be the main subject, and "the team" is not complete because we are talking about all the members. "Their crushing defeat" is something called the "object" of the sentence, or the thing that the subject is doing something to.

Colons are used to indicate that a list is about to start. The sentence becomes "This is our shopping list for IKEA: a desk, comfy chairs, and a bamboo plant." The colon sets up the list very nicely for the reader. It is important, however, that there is an independent clause before the colon. For example, if we changed this sentence to read "Our shopping list for IKEA includes a desk, comfy chairs, and a bamboo plant," we couldn't put a colon after IKEA to indicate the list because "Our shopping list for IKEA includes" isn't an independent clause. A colon works for the above sentence only because "This is our shopping list for IKEA" is an independent clause.

Adjectives are words that describe people. places, or things (nouns). Adverbs are words that describe actions (verbs), and they usually end in -ly. In the above sentence, the blank is next to the verb "speak," so we know that we must have a word that describes how you have to speak. The answer is therefore "quietly," and the whole sentence reads "You have to speak quietly to avoid waking the baby."

The underlined word and all the answer options are called "transition" words. A transition is a word or phrase that moves from one idea to the next, and shows how the ideas are related to one another. For example, the transition "on the contrary" shows that the second idea ("I didn't want to put them to sleep with my rambling) is going to contradict, or oppose, the first idea ("I wanted to teach the students about proper English grammar"). The first idea was something I WANTED to do, but the second was something I DIDN"T WANT to do. So if we wanted to replace "on the contrary," we would have to find a transition that has the same function of contradicting or opposing ideas. "However," "that said," and "at the same time" all have that same function. "Therefore" is the only transition that would not have the same function as "on the contrary." "Therefore" is a transition word whose function is to conclude an idea, which is not what we're trying to do here, so it would not be able to replace the underlined portion.

A "contraction" is when you smoosh two words into one, like when "do" and "not" become "don't." The apostrophe shows that one of the original letters has been removed (in "don't" the second "o" has been taken out). So the contraction of "it" and "is" becomes "it's." The problem is that usually, when we have a singular subject like "it" and we're trying to show possession, we put an apostrophe before the "s" so the possessive of "it" should be "it's." But "it's" is already the contraction of "it is," like we just said! So for the possessive form of "it," we end up just leaving out the apostrophe, and it becomes "its."

Want an easy way to remember the difference? Consider the sentence "The dog chewed on its bone." If you aren't sure whether there should be an apostrophe in "its" or not, try substituting "it is" for "its" to see if that would make sense. If it does, then use the apostrophe! But if it doesn't (in this case the sentence would become "The dog chewed on it is bone," which makes no sense), then leave the apostrophe out.

We discussed before that a complete sentence needs a subject and a verb. An incomplete sentence, or a sentence that lacks either a subject or a verb, is called a "fragment." The third option is a fragment because it lacks a verb. It describes "the first attempt," the subject, but never follows through with a verb about what that first attempt is doing. Try reading it aloud; once you get to the end of the fragment, you'll get a feeling that there should be something else to complete it! Don't be fooled into thinking that a fragment is always short; sometimes, like the above sentence, they're actually quite long!

The full subject is "the coloring of the floors," which is singular, even though it looks plural because it ends with "floors." The main focus is on the "coloring," which is a singular thing. Therefore, the correct singular verb form to go along with the singular subject is "does not." It's easier to see when you take out the appositive "a horrible green shade of shag carpet" so the sentence just reads "The coloring of the floors does not match anything else in the house."

Dashes strongly set apart information that departs from the main idea of the sentence, and they usually come in pairs. In this sentence, the main idea is that "My mother can't cook to save her life." The extra information that she is also "a sweet woman with many wonderful qualities and talents" is radically different from the main information, and is almost contradicting it. So rather than setting it apart with something like commas, we want to show that it's radically different from our main point, so we put dashes around it and it becomes "My mother - a sweet woman with many wonderful qualities and talents - can't cook to save her life."

No commas are necessary. Often students who have learned the appositive rule will want to put commas around the name Rosalind Franklin, thinking that it could be removed from the sentence and the remaining sentence, "The scientist discovered the double helix," would still be grammatically correct. However, the problem is that we have lost the essential information, which is WHO discovered the double helix! Just saying "the scientist" is too vague and doesn't give us any useful information. So in this case, we would not put any commas in the sentence.

Semicolons act just like periods; they break up two independent clauses (just like in this explanation sentence, ha!). "It was pointless" and "we would never agree on which superhero, Superman or Batman, was the coolest" are both independent clauses. We could make them two separate sentences if we wanted, but we can also link them together with a semicolon to say "It was pointless; we would never agree on which superhero, Superman or Batman, was the coolest."

This is a question that asks you to fix something called a "misplaced modifier." A modifier is usually a phrase that gives us more detail about the subject, such as what the subject is doing or what the subject looks or feels like. Because modifiers describe subjects, we want to make sure that the modifier is always as close as possible to the subject that it is describing in a sentence. In all the above options, our modifier is "Walking down Main Street." So the question is, WHAT is walking down Main Street? Who is our subject? Even if we don't know for sure, we have to assume that our subject is something that can walk! When we look at the first three options, the subjects that immediately follow the modifier are "the town," "the houses," and "nobody." These are clearly not things that could be walking down Main Street! The last option is the only one that makes it clear WHO is walking down Main Street.

No comma is necessary in this sentence because "because" is not a FANBOYS conjunction!

If something is "redundant," it means that it is extra information that is unnecessary because it has already been covered. For example, saying "baby puppies" is redundant, because we know that "puppies" are baby dogs, so we don't need to also call them "baby." In the sentence "The international message was broadcast all over the world," we already know that "international" means something is going all over the world, so saying "all over the world" at the end gets redundant.

When the typical sentence structure of Subject + Verb + Object is followed, it is called "active voice." It feels "active" because it's very clear who is doing what to what! An example of this is sentence number 1, where "the US Congress" (Subject) "passed" (Verb) "the bill (Object). "Passive voice" is where this order is switched around to Object + Verb + Subject. It feels "passive" because we don't see the subject, the main "doer" of the verb, until the very end. An example of this is sentence number 2, where "the bill" (Object) "was passed by" (Verb) "the US Congress" (Subject).

These two clauses are independent clauses, meaning they could be complete sentences on their own. A semicolon, a period, and a comma with the "and" conjunction would be options for joining or separating them. The second option, which uses just a comma between them, is not a sufficient separation between the two independent clauses. That situation, where a comma tries to do a period's job but fails, is known as a "comma splice," and it isn't proper grammar.

If we took out "Hannah and," it would be clear that the sentence "The principal gave the award to me" would be correct. The other options would not be able to pass this test, so the sentence is fine the way it is.

The subject in this sentence is "the team." Even though we know that a team is made up of many members, saying "the team" is describing them as one singular entity, so it's a singular subject. Therefore, the correct singular subject pronoun that corresponds is "its," because "their" is only for plural subjects.

A run-on is where there are two independent clauses that aren't properly linked by a conjunction or separated with appropriate punctuation. Please note that, like with fragments, the length of the sentence has nothing to do it! For example, even though the other sentences are very long, the first sentence is the only one that has two independent clauses ("It was awful" and "there wasn't anything we could do) stuck together without any punctuation inbetween, so it is considered a run-on.

For the FANBOYS comma rule, you must put a comma before For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, or So in a sentence if it is surrounded by two independent clauses. For example, "I'm writing this explanation, and I'm enjoying every minute of it," I put a comma before "and" because "I'm writing this explanation" and "I'm enjoying every minute of it" are both independent clauses. However, if I changed the sentence to "I'm writing this explanation and enjoying every minute of it," I WOULD NOT put a comma before "and" because now "enjoying every minute of it" is a dependent clause.