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AP English Language and Composition 1.4 Comprehension 376 Views
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Description:
AP English Language and Composition: Comprehension Drill 1, Problem 4. In lines 41 through 45, "composed" modifies which word?
Transcript
- 00:00
[ musical flourish ]
- 00:03
And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Asiatic prairies,
- 00:07
where the buffalos roam in search of wonton soup.
- 00:10
Yep. Good stuff. Love that wonton soup...
- 00:13
[ mumbles ]
Full Transcript
- 00:19
All right, you done reading?
- 00:20
[ mumbles ]
- 00:30
[ mumbling continues ]
- 00:39
All right. And... you're done. Whether you like it or not.
- 00:43
In lines 41 through 45, "composed"
- 00:46
modifies which word? And here are the potential answers.
- 00:49
Five-dollar words... Blah, blah, blah...
- 00:52
And let's just go.
- 00:54
So, to make this easier, we'll lift the chunk in question out of
- 00:57
the rest so that we can check it out in isolation.
- 01:00
Right here.
- 01:01
Ah, there we go. Okay, so, that's better.
- 01:03
Wow, these Asiatic prairies sound... relaxing.
- 01:06
No time for relaxing, though. Gotta focus.
- 01:09
Uh-huh. Okay, there's the word "composed,"
- 01:12
which in this case is being used as a verb and is the
- 01:15
predicate of the sentence. So the question becomes
- 01:18
who exactly is doing the composing?
- 01:20
Which noun is the subject that goes along with the verb "compose"?
- 01:24
It looks like the thing that makes this question a little tricky is the use of the
- 01:27
following interrupting phrases:
- 01:30
"the wandering nomads from the distant Asiatic prairies,
- 01:32
enjoying a free and easy existence as fighters and hunters..."
- 01:36
Hmm. We're rethinking our dream of being a nomad.
- 01:40
Fighting and hunting all day sounds, well, kind of stressful.
- 01:42
Sorry, we're really trying to focus here.
- 01:44
Since the interrupting phrases are set apart from the rest of the sentence with commas,
- 01:48
we can ignore them when trying to figure out which noun is the subject.
- 01:52
The commas signal that we can remove the phrases without changing the basic meaning of the sentence.
- 01:57
So, listen, we'll prove it.
- 01:58
Our own ancestors composed songs which
- 02:02
celebrated the mighty deeds of their greatest leaders and yadda yadda yadda.
- 02:06
See, it totally makes sense.
- 02:08
Since we know that no words included in these phrases are crucial to the sentence,
- 02:11
we can cross out choice A - existence, C - prairies,
- 02:15
and D - fighters. We're looking for the subject,
- 02:17
and we can never remove a subject from a sentence without
- 02:20
causing the whole darn thing to collapse.
- 02:22
With those rude interrupting phrases out of the way, it's now clear that
- 02:25
the noun "ancestors"
- 02:27
is the subject that goes with the verb "composed."
- 02:30
This makes choice B the right answer. Like ancestors composed.
- 02:33
Yeah. It's sort of amazing they had any time for poetry with
- 02:36
all the fighting and hunting and nomad-ing that they were doing. Yeah.
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