SKILL 1 BE
SURE THE SENTENCE HAS A SUBJECT AND A VERB
You know that a sentence
in English should have a subject and a verb. The most common types of problems
that you will encounter in the Structure section of the TOEFL test have to do
with subjects and verbs: perhaps the sentence is missing either the subject or
the verb or both, or perhaps the sentence has an extra subject or verb.
Example
I
____ was backed up for
miles on the freeway.
(A) Yesterday
(B) In the morning
(C) Traffic
(D) Cars
In this example you should notice immediately that there is a verb (was),
but there is no subject. Answer
(C) is the best answer because it is a singular subject that agrees with the
singular verb was.
Answer (A), yesterday,
and answer (B), in the morning,
are not subjects, so they are
not correct. Although answer (D), cars, could be a subject, it is not correct
because cars
is plural and it does not agree
with the singular verb was.
Example
II
Engineers____ for work on
the new space program.
(A) necessary
(B) are needed
(C) hopefully
(D) next month
In this example you should notice immediately that the sentence has a
subject (engineers),
and that there is no verb. Because answer (B), are needed,
is a verb, it is the best
answer.
Answers (A), (C), and (D) are
not verbs, so they are not correct.
Example
III
The boy _____ going to
the movies with a friend.
(A) he is
(B) he always was
(C) is relaxing
(D) will be
This sentence has a subject (boy) and has part of a verb (going); to be correct, some form of the verb be
is needed to make the sentence
complete. Answers (A) and (B) are incor-rect because the sentence already has a
subject (boy)
and does not need the extra
subject he. Answer (C) is incorrect because relaxing is an extra verb part that is unnecessary
be-cause of going.
Answer (D) is the best answer; will be
together with going is
a complete verb.
The following chart
oudines what you should remember about subjects and verbs:
SUBJECT
AND VERBS :
A sentence in English must have
at least one subject and one verb.
SKILL 2 BE CAREFUL OF APPOSITIVES
Appositives can cause
confusion in the Structure section of the TOEFL test because an appositive can
be mistaken for the subject of a sentence. An appositive is a noun that comes
before or after another noun and has the same meaning.
Sally, the best
student in the class, got an A on the exam.
In this example Sally
is the subject of the sentence and the best
student in the class can easily be recognized as an appositive phrase
because of the noun student and
because of the commas. The sentence says that Sally and the
best student in the class are the same person. Note that if you leave
out the appositive phrase, the sentence still makes sense (Sally
got an A on the exam).
The following example
shows how an appositive can be confused with the subject of
a sentence in the Structure section of the TOEFL test.
Example
I
____, George, is
attending the lecture.
(A) Right now
(B) Happily
(C) Because of the time
(D) My friend
In this example you should recognize from the commas that George
is not the subject of the
sentence. George
is an appositive. Because this
sentence still needs a subject, the best answer is (D), my friend.
Answers (A), (B), and (C) are
incorrect because they are not subjects.
The next example shows
that an appositive does not always come after the subject;
an appositive can also come at the beginning of the sentence.
Example
II
____, Sarah rarely misses
her basketball shots.
(A) An excellent
basketball player
(B) An excellent
basketball player is
(C) Sarah is an excellent
basketball player
(D) Her excellent
basketball play
In this example you can tell that Sarah is the subject and misses
is the verb because there is no comma
separating them. In the space you should put an appositive for Sarah, and Sarah
is an excellent basketball
player, so answer (A) is the best answer. Answers (B) and (C) are not correct because
they each contain the verb is,
and an appositive does not need
a verb. Answer (D) contains a noun, play,
that could possibly be an
appositive, but play
is not the same as Sarah,
so this answer is not correct.
The following chart
outlines the key information that you should remember about appositives:
APPOSITIVES
:
An appositive is a noun that comes before or after another noun and is
generally set off from the noun with commas. If a word is an appositive, it is
not the subject. The following appositive structures are both possible in English.
S APP,
V
Tom, a really
good mechanic, is fixing the car.
APP, S V
A
really good mechanic, Tom is fixing
the car.
