S-V AGREEMENT AND VERB TENSES

1.      During the American Civil War, Thomas Morris Chester braved the front lines as a war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press. Amplifying the voices and experiences of Black soldiers ______ of particular importance to Chester, who later became an activist and lawyer during the postwar Reconstruction period.

 Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

•  A. were

• B. have been

•  C. are

• D. was

1.     The artistic talents of Barbara Chase-Riboud, most known for her 1979 historical novel Sally Hemings and the conversation it inspired, ______ limited to the realm of prose: she first excelled in sculpture, where her affinity for bronze—a material she described as “timeless” due to its use across eras and cultures—became part of her artistic identity.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• A. hasn’t been

• B. wasn’t

• C. isn’t

• D. aren’t

1.     Working from an earlier discovery of Charpentier’s, chemists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna—winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—re-created and then reprogrammed the so-called “genetic scissors” of a species of DNA cleaving bacteria ______ a tool that is revolutionizing the field of gene technology.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• A. to forge

• B. forging

• C. forged

• D. and forging

1.     Ten of William Shakespeare’s plays are classified as histories. Although each one of these plays, which include Henry V and Richard III, ______ on a single historical figure (specifically, an English king), some, such as Henry VI Part One and Henry VI Part Two, feature different episodes from the same monarch’s life. 

   

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

•  A. focuses

•  B. focus

•  C. are focused

• D. were focused

1.     Planetary scientist Briony Horgan and her colleagues have determined that as much as 25 percent of the sand on Mars is composed of impact spherules. These spherical bits of glass form when asteroids collide with the planet, ejecting bits of molten rock into the atmosphere that, after cooling and solidifying into glass, ______ back onto Mars’s surface.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• A. to rain

• B. raining

• C. having rained

• D. rain

Author Madeline L’Engle, ______ to create a suspenseful tone that draws the reader in, begins her novel A Wrinkle in Time with descriptions of “wraithlike shadows” and “the frenzied lashing of the wind.”

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• A. looked

• B. looks

• C. is looking

• D. looking

7.     A second-generation Japanese American, Wataru Misaka ______ in World War II (1941-45) and won two amateur national basketball championships at the University of Utah when he joined the New York Knicks for the 1947-48 season, becoming the first non-white basketball player in the US’s top professional league.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• A. already served

• B. was already serving

• C. already serves

• D. had already served

7.     Bengali author Toru Dutt’s A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), a volume of English translations of French poems, ______ scholars’ understanding of the transnational and multilingual contexts in which Dutt lived and worked.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• A. are enhancing

•  B. has enhanced

• C. have enhanced

• D. enhance

In 1994, almost 200 years after the death of Wang Zhenyi, the International Astronomical ______ the contributions of the barrier-breaking 18th-century astronomer and author of “Dispute of the Procession of the Equinoxes,” naming a crater on Venus after her.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

•  A. Union would finally acknowledge

•  B. Union to finally acknowledge

• C. Union, having finally acknowledged

• D. Union, finally acknowledging

10.  Researchers studying the “terra-cotta army,” the thousands of life-size statues of warriors found interred near the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang of China, were shocked to realize that the shape of each statue’s ears, like the shape of each person’s ears, ______ unique.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• A. are

• B.  is

• C. were

•  D. have been