Advanced Topics Flashcards
7 cards from real English Grammar Test practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Advanced Topics flashcards as text
Which sentence demonstrates correct subject-verb agreement with a collective noun?
Answer: The team is celebrating its victory.
In American English, collective nouns like 'team' typically take singular verbs when acting as a unit.
What is an example of anaphora as a rhetorical device?
Answer: We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields.
Anaphora is the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, as in Churchill's famous speech.
Which option correctly identifies the voice of the verb in: 'The report was submitted by the intern'?
Answer: Passive voice
The subject ('the report') receives the action rather than performing it, making this passive voice.
Which sentence contains a correctly used absolute phrase?
Answer: The storm approaching, we decided to stay indoors.
An absolute phrase ('The storm approaching') has its own subject and modifies the entire main clause without using a conjunction.
Which of the following is an example of a nominative absolute construction used correctly?
Answer: The letter being read, she began to cry.
'The letter being read' is a nominative absolute: a noun phrase with a participle that modifies the entire clause.
What does it mean for a sentence to have 'syntactic ambiguity'?
Answer: The sentence can be parsed in more than one grammatically valid way.
Syntactic ambiguity occurs when a sentence's structure allows two or more valid grammatical interpretations, e.g., 'I saw the man with the telescope.'
Which sentence uses an em dash correctly?
Answer: The answer—as everyone suspected—was obvious.
Em dashes set off a parenthetical remark within a sentence; they are used without spaces in American English style.