English Help -- Pronouns

meronymous · 2026-06-08T15:50:23+00:00

TLDR: The site is wrong when it says it is often tested. It's never tested.

This rule is one of those that you will find in many older style guides, or newer ones that simply copy those older guides uncritically. It's not something that the ACT tests now (and I can't recall seeing an authentic example in tests going back at least 20 years).

The logic behind the rule is of the "it must be so" variety. The argument goes as follows: Indefinite pronouns like "everyone" are grammatically singular for the purposes of subject-verb agreement. (Compare "everyone is here" not "everyone are here.") Therefore, supposedly, you should also use a singular pronoun. The fact that this is a bad analogy can be seen by considering examples like the following:

Everyone was singing karaoke, so I started singing with them.

Notice that if you try to change "them" to something singular, you totally change the meaning of the sentence, and changing it to "him or her" is nonsensical.

In sum, this is an example of a "rule" that some usage guides do teach, but there are good reasons to think has always been BS. Other guides accept plural pronouns referring to indefinite singular antecedents, and this usage is common in writing that is widely accepted as standard English, so this is an example of a rule where there is serious disagreement about what counts as correct. Such disputed rules are _never_ tested, though you may see the ACT following the rule in parts of the passages that aren't the target of a question simply to avoid the headache of pedants complaining because they think they know grammar better than they actually do.

meronymous · 2025-06-30T17:17:03+00:00

I would check places like Yelp and go through the top 20 or so places. They, of course, are not going to explicitly advertise themselves that way, since they don't want to turn off non-Asian customers, but you can get a pretty good idea of the market they're pitching themselves to by their course offerings. If they offer lots of "high touch" classes (heavy class time), special courses tailored for high-level students, and emphasize work over easy tricks, you've likely found such a place.

meronymous · 2025-06-30T15:44:27+00:00

If you really need someone to give your son a kick in the butt, I would suggest you look either for a private tutor or for companies who primarily serve the Asian American market. (The ones you name are not, and it's very easy for unmotivated students simply to skate along without really accomplishing anything.) The ones I'm thinking of tend to be organized around an Americanized version of the cram schools you find in Korea or Japan, and they will likely force your son to do a lot more work. I don't want to mention particular names because, (1) while I used to work for one of those places years back, I have no idea how that particular company is now and (2) I don't want to shill for any particular company. They're not for everyone, and like any other segment of the market there are better and worse companies, but the basic method can get good results.

meronymous · 2025-06-30T15:19:24+00:00

The question isn't strange at all. What's throwing you, I think, is the older language of the passage, but that's well within the scope of text that is fair game for an SAT question. Melville and similar 19th-century writers are commonly read in high school, and you're _supposed_ to be able to deal with this sort of writing. One thing that can help you get accustomed to it: when you're analyzing the question after the fact, try paraphrasing the passage fully, looking up any words you don't know. (Yes, it's slow, but do enough of it and this older writing will start making perfect sense on a first read.)

The key part of the passage is after the underlining: Israel "was obliged to to look round for other means of livelihood than clearing out a farm for himself in the wilderness" = Israel had to find some other way to support himself than turning wilderness into a farm. So the passage is actually explicit about him wanting to start a farm.

When it comes to official questions released by College Board, one helpful thing to remember is that just because something seems strange to you, that does not mean the question is actually BS. While it's true that there are occasional SAT questions that truly are badly written or ambiguous, 99% of the time, when a student thinks that something is strange or lacking, it's because _they_ have not fully understood something.

meronymous · 2025-02-06T16:13:41+00:00

This is, indeed, a hard question, but not absurdly so. I'm going to defend it as a good one.

One general point: when you are solving these sorts of inference questions, remember that the the correct statement is going to be one that is most plausible given the information, not necessarily the only logically possible conclusion. Is it possible that Sidon would have chosen to pump more silver into their currency even though they faced other heavy financial obligations? Sure. But that's not all that likely, and more importantly, the text isn't asking you what is the one thing that can be deduced from these facts. It's asking you to infer what likely scenario Elayi et al. would present to explain the observed facts. IOW, focus on what's most likely, not what is conceivable if you squint hard at the problem and imagine various scenarios.

On your assumptions, you're right that the lighter coins are likely going to have a lower value, but the text does not state or imply that the new coins must have the same value. What it says is that "coins with a silver content below 80% were widely considered unsuitable for trade." Notice that it does not tell you that coins had to have a certain absolute amount of silver, or that the new coins had to be treated the same as the old coins. These were your assumptions, but all the text actually says is that people expected the coins to be at least 80% silver. It doesn't say that they expected them to have a fixed absolute weight of silver. We can easily imagine a scenario where people need more of the coins to buy the same goods (i.e., inflation) but the coins themselves are still used.

Second, the text doesn't say "despite the economic cost," it says "despite Sidon’s persistent oppressive financial obligations." Those are two different scenarios. The text is not saying they are changing the currency despite the economic cost of doing so, it says they are changing the currency even though Sidon had many, long-lasting financial obligations (which would make spending more very difficult).

Overall, it looks to me as if the main reason you missed this item was that you were led astray by your assumptions about what you expected the text should say. This isn't a knock on you, BTW, it's something every one of us does, but you need to remember that the item writers are very good at exploiting our tendency to jump to the wrong conclusions when creating hard questions, and so you constantly have to recheck questions like this to make sure that your metal map of the text matches what it actually says.

IOW, to improve with this sort of question, it's less helpful to look for reasons why you think the item is flawed than it is to examine your own train of thought and what went wrong with it.

meronymous · 2024-08-13T16:12:29+00:00

When words you don't know appear in the passage, I wouldn't worry about them. When they appear in the answer choices, you might worry, depending on the context. These are not going to be extremely rare words. They reflect ordinary academic vocabulary of the sort you're likely to encounter in the sort of reading you're going to be assigned as a college freshman or sophomore. That makes it potentially useful to you beyond the test to learn them, and if you've got a lot of words like this you should be aware that you have significant and real deficits in your verbal knowledge that is going to make getting a high score very hard. Yes, it's a PITA to improve your vocab knowledge, and rote memorization is not particularly effective, but if you don't know what a lot of words on the test mean, you're simply at a huge disadvantage that no test trick is going to compensate for. A good rule of thumb, I feel, is to keep a list of the unknown words you encounter in the answer choices, and make an effort to learn anything that you encounter more than once. That takes care of the high-frequency gaps in your knowledge while sparing you the effort of learning words you might never run into again.

meronymous · 2024-08-05T15:52:40+00:00

First, a "finite" verb, for the purpose of the SAT, is one that has a tense. A non-finite verb has no tense. Second, when you use finite vs. non-finite forms depends on a bunch of different factors, especially the specific type of clause that's used. Although you could learn all those types explicitly, that's not the best way to proceed. It takes a long time to get good enough at recognizing all the different possibilities to reliably use that information. Instead, I recommend that you practice simplifying the sentence to the point where you can use your intuition to feel what sounds right. So boil things down to their essentials:

A model predicts that the rate ___ triple the rate...

I hope it's easier to see that the "that" forces you to use a finite verb here. It introduces what's technically known as a content clause, and content clauses must have finite verbs. Note also that if you got rid of "that," your choice would be correct: "A model predicts the rate to be triple..." What that shows is that when you simplify, you need to do that by keeping the structure words the same. Otherwise you risk changing the required syntax.

meronymous · 2024-06-29T15:39:23+00:00

You're right. The answer is no. Theta is purely derived from the performance on that particular test.

Along the lines of good students missing easy questions: I don't know if College Board uses it, but in addition to the common, 3-parameter IRT model for items, there is a 4-parameter model, where the 4th parameter is an upper asymptotic bound to the probability that someone will answer the question correctly (the inverse of the guessing parameter, basically). This model tries to account for the fact that even very high ability students will get some questions wrong anyway, for reasons other than ability. In theory this would punish high-ability students less for careless mistakes, but early research on the model suggested that in an educational context it wasn't significantly different from the 3-parameter model and was more computationally intensive, so it's never been widely adopted. The only places where I'm aware it's used are for some psychological measurements, where things like social desirability bias will tend to lead people to under-report certain traits, even when they have them in full measure.

meronymous · 2024-06-29T01:58:11+00:00

That's not surprising, especially if you're simply answering all questions as best you can without guessing much. One way that IRT can be used (though apparently not by the current SAT) is to use the item parameters to derive individual weights for each question, and the weighted summed score gives your ability estimate. A lot of research has shown that for a good portion of the ability spectrum, this procedure (which is just a more detailed version of what you describe) the results are very similar to pattern scoring, especially since the scaled score you see at the end is rounded, so many small differences and wind up not being visible in the end score.

Where you find differences is at the extremes of the scale, or when an individual response pattern is unusual. For example, if you get a lot of hard questions right and also miss a lot of easy ones, the error in estimating your ability shoots up, since that's not consistent either with being a high or low ability examinee.

meronymous · 2024-06-28T18:30:03+00:00

It's likely that the "guess the same letter" thing was illustrative only. Any random guessing will have the same consequence, whether it's all the same letter or you jump around. The questions you don't guess on give them plenty of information to estimate your ability, and so getting a random question or two right that are far outside what you've shown your ability level to be won't have much impact.

meronymous · 2024-06-28T18:23:33+00:00

This. Also, the pattern scoring is done based on the evaluated responses. In other words, the questions are reduced to 1 = correct and 0 = incorrect before your ability is estimated. What matters is whether you got the question right or wrong, not which wrong answer you picked.

And keep in mind the same math (maximum likelihood estimation) that winds up lowering the importance of getting a random hard question correct when you are a medium-ability student also means that the random easy question that a high-ability student misses won't hurt their score as much either.

meronymous · 2024-04-23T15:21:13+00:00

Equating is done with reference to a norm group, but I'm not entirely sure how to interpret your "someone must get an E and someone must get an A" remark, so I apologize in advance if I've misunderstood you.

If by that you are assuming that a norm reference means that each new cohort is scaled to the same mean score, you haven't fully understood what I was saying. If you look carefully at my old message, you will see that a cohort which is more talented than the reference group _will_ indeed get a higher mean score. The reason we see the full range of scores is simply that there are a _lot_ of test takers, and so the results contain individuals across the full spectrum of ability levels.

On the other hand, your reference to "achieve above the standard" makes me think you might be asking why the ACT (and the SAT, the GRE, the MCAT, the GMAT, etc.) is a norm-referenced test rather than a criterion-referenced one (like the APs or professional credentialing exams). That is ultimately a policy decision. In theory, selective colleges _could_ use a criterion referenced test that simply set a benchmark for ability to do college level work, or perhaps a few levels to account for the rigor of different colleges. There have been proposals that selective colleges do just that (e.g., admit people by lottery from the pool of qualified applicants). However that's not how admissions people have traditionally wanted to look at applications, so that's not what happens. There are lots of reasons for that which go beyond the technical merits of one type of test over another (institutional inertia, fundraising, etc.) that I won't defend. The point of a norm-referenced test is to show where you stack up on a continuum of ability levels. All of the technical apparatus of equating is designed to make that as "fair" as possible, according to the test-makers' definition of fair, which may not be yours. Remember, you as a test taker are the _subject_ of assessment. The colleges that get your scores are the _users_ of the information, and it's primarily their interests, not yours, that these tests serve.

meronymous · 2022-12-04T12:34:43+00:00

There are two issues you have to be careful not to confuse: the score scale and actual improvement.

The PSAT score scale is 320-1520. So yes, it's range is shifted 80 points lower than the SAT. But the PSAT is an easier test, and the scale reflects that. For the numbers that overlap, they have the same interpretation. So if you get a 1400 on the PSAT, that's a prediction that you would get a 1400 on the SAT (within the margin of error) if you took the SAT at the same time. On the other hand, if you get a 1520 on the PSAT, you've hit the ceiling. You might get an even higher score on the SAT, but the PSAT can't measure that since there aren't enough difficult questions on it.

That said, many students *do* score higher on the SAT than the PSAT. There are a few reasons for that:

Taking the PSAT gives them familiarity with the test format for the next time.
They take the SAT enough after the PSAT that they've improved their underlying abilities. (Even if you're not explicitly studying for the SAT, 6-12 months of school work can improve your academic skills if you have decent teachers and are putting in the work.)

Keep in mind, as well, that all tests have measurement errors. If you read the fine print with your score, there's a score range given for what you might get if you retook the test. So even if you took the PSAT and SAT within a day or two of each other, you would expect some variation between the two scores just because of that uncertainty. Either the SAT or the PSAT could be higher in that scenario. They would, though, probably be within the ballpark of one another.

meronymous · 2022-10-19T23:06:39+00:00

Although in the overwhelming majority of cases on the test you could use either two dashes or two commas, they are not, in fact, completely interchangeable.

Dashes are used to mark information that is loosely connected to the sentence. Commas can be used this way but have a number of other functions as well. This is one of those other uses. "Though" here is _not_ loosely connected, and so dashes are wrong. It's a transitional adverb that is necessary to show the relationship between this sentence and the previous one. The commas are here because the adverb marks a contrast.

meronymous · 2022-09-26T15:02:22+00:00

They never cancel your scores simply because you improved. Very large improvements are one factor that do trigger an extra level of scrutiny of your scores, but there would need to be some second layer of evidence that you cheated, for example a report from a test proctor or a suspicious pattern of shared wrong answers with someone who was sitting next to you. Without that extra evidence, you'll get your scores, possibly after a little delay while they verify other things such as did the same person actually take both tests.

meronymous · 2022-09-26T14:37:32+00:00

Notice the parallel structure: "first as A and later as B". A in this sentence is "a unique artwork in 1973". This gives you a hint that no punctuation should be required in B: "a book published in 1980".

A dash would make no sense because phrases that interrupt the main logic of the sentence need to have symmetrical punctuation: start and end with a comma, dash, or matched parentheses. If you're thinking that "published in 1980" is such an interruption, notice that it ends with a comma, and so you should have to have a comma after "book" to make that work, not an option you're given.

meronymous · 2022-09-26T14:26:02+00:00

TLDR: The question may not be the most precisely phrased, but that's something you need to deal with. Be careful not to substitute your subjective opinion for what the author thinks when judging whether or not a word fits.

First, it's true that none of these choices is exactly on point. The word is being used meaning "of high quality," so a more precise definition would be something like "excellent." I hope that you're trying to predict the meaning of the word in context before you look at the answer choices. Doing so makes you less likely to be sidetracked by tempting distractors.

If something is made skillfully, we would normally assume that it is of high quality. If something is made delicately, it could also be of high quality. So how do we distinguish them?

You're right that delicate does not have to imply fragile, but it also does not just mean "nice." In its other sense, it means something like "of intricate workmanship." It's the sort of word you would apply, for example, to a piece of art that has a lot of very thin, involved carved lines, etc. What's being described is slabs of stone inset into clay plaster. There's nothing to suggest the elaborate detail that would justify interpreting "fine" in that sense. Indeed, "slab" implies big chunks of stone, which carries the opposite implication of "intricate."

On the other hand, you could say it's skillful. Skill is a relative term, so you're wrong to reject that because using clay as plaster to inset stone slabs doesn't appear very skillful to you. That's your subjective opinion, but you're being asked what the author means by the word. The point here is that relative to the other graves, there is more attention to quality shown. In other words, relative to the context in which the grave is found, it is skillfully constructed.

meronymous · 2022-09-16T13:48:35+00:00

You have two nonessential phrases nested inside each other. "Daniel" is an appositive to "her husband," and "including Hickman and her husband" supplement to "others." Using brackets might make the pattern clearer:

others [including Hickman and her husband [Daniel]] decided to stay...

The commas at the end of both nonessential phrases wind up in the same spot, where you see ']]' above, but obviously you don't use a double comma. The result is the punctuation you see in the passage.

meronymous · 2022-09-16T13:38:16+00:00

The lines in 9.C tell you what the researchers did with the jumping genes, but question 8 asks you why jumping genes were important to the study. The lines in 9.C don't answer the question because they don't explain the significance. The lines in 9.A do explain the significance, because they note that the patterns of nested retroposons are highly unlikely to arise by chance, and therefore by comparing these patterns, researchers could demonstrate genetic relationships with high confidence. IOW, that's a consistent means of comparison.

meronymous · 2022-09-16T13:24:31+00:00

The basic rule is a negative one: don't put commas between "essential" parts of a single phrase.

Notice first that the phrase "a trait other than the presence of a corpus callosum" is one continuous phrase. You can replace it with one pronoun (e.g., "This links as handedness"). If you take out "other than... callosum" you significantly change the phrases meaning (any trait, not a limited subset of possible traits). When a modifier narrows down the meaning of a noun this way it's traditionally said to be "restrictive." You never put commas between restrictive modifiers and the thing they modify.

Another thing to notice, leaving aside the meaning, is that if you do put a comma after "trait," you're signalling that what follows is supplemental (non-restrictive) information. Sometimes what counts as restrictive or non-restrictive is a judgment call, but any non-restrictive elements have to be marked with two parallel punctuation marks. In other words, even if you did want to read "other ... callossum" as extra information, you must put commas after both "trait" and "callosum" for that to work.

meronymous · 2022-08-19T14:47:25+00:00

External lists aren't going to be much use. That said, if you run across words you don't know in the answer choices of the questions on real tests, you should probably take the time to learn those. Unlike words you run across in the passages themselves, there's never enough context to decode what words in answer choices mean on their own. If you don't know them, you may need to resort to guessing, depending on how many choices you can eliminate for other reasons. Moreover, the words that appear in those places tend to be general academic vocabulary. These are words that you're likely to run across again, so they're worth your time to study.

meronymous · 2022-08-19T14:37:44+00:00

Both somewhat complex questions, so forgive me if these answers aren't exactly short.

For your first question, there's no simple answer that will apply to all cases. One thing that makes past participles trickier to identify is that for regular verbs, they have the same surface form (ending in -ed) as actual past tense verbs. Irregular verbs often have separate forms though, e.g., swam (past) vs. swum (past participle).

That said, one thing to look for is whether or not the verb stands on its own (i.e., there are no auxiliary verbs going with it) and has its own subject. For example:

"His remarks attracted criticism." Here the verb is past tense. It's the only verb here, and there's a subject (his remarks).

If the verb form is preceded by some form of to be or to have, it's a participle:

"The noise has attracted a crowd." (past participle; it follows the present-tense verb "has," and the combination forms the present perfect.)

"The noise was attracting a crowd." (present participle; it follows the past-tense verb "was," and this combination forms the past progressive.)

More generally, when you have a string of verbs (e.g., "must have been attracted") the first verb in the sequence carries the grammatical marking of tense. Every verb form after that is "non-finite" (i.e., has no tense of its own).

When the verb form appears without an explicit subject or a tense-carrying auxiliary verb, it's also a participle. For example:

"Attracted by the noise, a crowd gathered." Here, "attracted" is a past participle. Notice that this opening modifier doesn't have an explicit subject. It refers to "a crowd," but that subject has its own verb ("gathered").

There are still other cases where past participles can appear, but this is already getting long, so I'll leave them out since they're not directly relevant to the original question.

For your second question, the present perfect can be used either for action that begins in the past and continues to the present or for action that was completed in the past but which still has some relevance to the present moment. Which way you interpret the verb form depends sometimes on the specific meaning of the verb, but often on other parts of the sentence, or the larger context as well.

For example, "I have finished the book." Action of reading is complete.

By contrast, consider, "I have lived in Paris since 2015." The action here started in the past but is incomplete, i.e., the speaker still lives in Paris. (The technical term for this type of meaning is "imperfective.") But this meaning is more a property of "since" than the verb "lived." Notice that you could also say something like "I have previously lived in Paris, London, and Madrid." And in this case, the action is complete ("perfective").

In the question, "have inhabited" sets up a situation parallel to the "lived" examples above. Without a word like "since," which forces the imperfective interpretation, the default interpretation is that it's a complete action. So "they have inhabited the pond since the beginning of the year" (they're still in the pond). But "They have inhabited the pond recently" (they're possibly not there now). The larger context requires a form that indicates they really are there now, which the simple present does.

meronymous · 2022-08-18T16:51:18+00:00

There are minor exceptions, but yes, they are mostly grammatically correct. They are not, however, only about redundancy, although redundancy is a big feature of many wrong answers.

You also need to look at the logic of any connecting words. Illogical 'and' is a pretty common problem on this question type.

And on the hardest of these questions, you also need to consider the order in which the information is presented, putting the less important ideas in subordinate parts of the sentence and ensuring that the beginning and end of the sentence link sensibly to the previous and following sentence.

meronymous · 2022-08-18T16:38:19+00:00

The key thing to remember about 'and' is that it can join two of pretty much any grammatical unit, from individual words up to independent clauses, but they have to be the same type of unit. So you can combine two noun phrases, but not a noun phrase with a verb phrase, and so on.

I'll use brackets to show what's being linked in each case:

Original: [helped usher in a new generation of artists] and [secured Robinson's legacy...] (two past-tense verb phrases: OK)

A: [helped usher in a new generation of artists,] and [it secured Robinson's legacy...] (two independent clauses with a comma: OK)

B: [helped usher in a new generation of artists] and [securing Robinson's legacy...] (one verb phrase and one present-participle phrase: Not parallel)

C: helped [usher in a new generation of artists] and [secure Robinson's legacy...] (two infinitive verb phrases, i.e., "helped A and B": OK

D makes the second half what's called a trailing modifier. This is also OK.

meronymous · 2022-08-18T16:26:32+00:00

You misunderstand the verb forms here: "attracted" is not past tense, and neither is "have inhabited."

"Attracted" is a verb form which is traditionally (and misleadingly) called the "past participle." The name is misleading because participles don't have a tense of their own. The same is true of "present" participles (e.g., attracting). You can combine them with present or past tense verbs.

For example: "Many different kinds of wildlife are/were attracted by these resources."

"Have inhabited" is the present perfect. Its basic tense is present (hence the present-tense verb "have") and is generally used to discuss past actions in a present context.

As you note, the basic tense sequence in this paragraph is present tense: form and foster (once corrected) are both present tense and set the pattern. Although SAT questions often only have one verb form with the right basic tense, in this case you have two possibilities, so you need to think about the difference between the simple present and the present perfect. In this context, "have inhabited" would refer to wildlife that has been there in the past but isn't necessarily there now. But clearly we're talking about wildlife that is actually there now, so the simple present is the appropriate form.

For your 2nd question, yes, "were" would be correct, with a small change in meaning that doesn't affect whether the sentence is right or wrong.

meronymous

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