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Course: SAT > Unit 11
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Writing: Noun Agreement — Video Lesson
David shows you how to do a Noun Agreement question on the SAT Writing and Language test. Created by David Rheinstrom.
Want to join the conversation?
- why isnt the answer c. they listed other types of protected areas, so should it not be c(4 votes)
- Because they listed singular nouns, not plural nouns. If you had, "singular noun, singular noun, plural noun," that messed everything up. To be most consistent and grammatically-correct, you should use B).
Therefore,
B) is correct.(5 votes)
- Sorry, but is the answer B or C? there is a shift in the circled answer near the end of the video.(2 votes)
- The answer is B). We need the singular "type" and "area" because we have a list of singular nouns, which B) provides. I guess near the end of the video they cut to another take where C) was circled, probably to explain something. But B) is the correct answer.(4 votes)
- We want all our nouns to agree with each other. Here, we're talking about "dogs" and "animals", so we use the plural, "pets" instead of "pet".(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] We're looking
at question two today. So I'm gonna read this whole paragraph under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the Organic Act of 1916
and other federal laws, the U.S. Government has the
power to take custody of land when having historical significance
or great natural beauty. The designation of a
territory as a national park, national monument, or other
types of protected area, can limit activities such
as oil drilling and logging and provide funding for staff
to work on preservation, maintenance, and visitor assistance. Okay, so the underlined
portion for question two, types of protected area, is the no change option, that's choice A, choice B is type of protected area, choice C is type of protected areas, and D is protected area types. So the only thing that's
changing around in these choices except for D which moves the
order of the words around is the number of the nouns, sometimes type is singular, sometimes it's plural as types, same deal with area versus areas. So that means that this is
a noun agreement question, and you're likely only going
to see one of these questions on the writing and language
portion of your SAT. And what these questions ask you to do is make sure that you use plural nouns when plural nouns are called for and singular nouns when a
singular noun is called for. Like if I say, my dogs
ran excitedly to the door, wagging their tail, it's unlikely that multiple dogs only have one tail among them to wag, so the correct way to phrase
that would be to change tail to tails. Let me hold here for a
second and pause the video if you wanna take a crack
at this question yourself. All right, let's get going. Let's see if there's
anything in the sentence that feels plural or singular. The designation of a
territory as a national park, national monument or other
blank of protected blank. Well, we're designating
a singular territory, a territory, as a national
park or a national monument. So it's a singular territory, a singular park or a singular monument. It's unlikely that you'd
take one territory and say, this is two national parks, we're talking about one. So since we're talking about
turning a singular territory into a singular kind of protected area, it follows that a territory
would be a singular type, not types. So that knocks out choices A and D because they use the plural, types. That leaves choices, B and C, are we talking about one
kind of protected area or multiple kinds of protected areas? We're looking for a singular
thing, a type of area, we're talking about three
possible designations, a territory, a national park and some unspecified designation but all three are singular, a territory, a national
park, the designation, and that means we're looking to match up with singular nouns, type and area to match
with territory or park. And our only choice with
two singular nouns is B, type of protected area. What I'm doing here is really
leaning on parallel structure, we see that the rest of the sentence is full of singular nouns, so what maintains the pattern best? It's choice B. This question didn't some
of the telltale hints I would otherwise look for
in a noun agreement question. There weren't any verbs we could lean on to tell us if we were
looking for a singular or a plural noun like dogs
are domesticated animal, and that should be animals because we not only have this plural hint but we also have, are,
that's another plural hint. And there weren't descriptive asides that would introduce other nouns like, dogs which are furry, domesticated animals are kept as pet by humans, and we would add an S to that. And so we not only have
the hint of, are, here but we also have plural animals
and of course, plural dogs. So your strategy would be
to look for hints elsewhere in the paragraph to see if
there's pronouns, verbs, other nouns that can
tell you whether or not the underlined word or phrase
should be singular or plural. And once you've made that binary decision, you can knock out a few choices, and make finding the
answer that much easier.