This lesson will focus on practice with questions about nouns and their use, in particular, checking for a complete subject. Every sentence must have a subject, and this can be in the form of a words like nouns, pronouns, and gerunds, or structures such as noun clauses and phrases. Consider the following sentence:
__________ spent all day preparing for their exams.
The verb "spent" requires a subject that is grammatically correct and makes sense in the context of the sentence. A possible answer could be "Students". Look at the next example with possible choices:
__________ of the people at my school were born in the same small town.
- Eighty percent
- Eighty percent is
- That eighty percent
- In eighty percent
The key to this answer is realizing that the full verb that is missing the subject is "were born". Before this is "of the people" and "at my school", both of which are prepositional phrases and do not act as subjects. The second answer choice includes a verb, making it incorrect. The third choice begins a noun clause and would result in an incomplete sentence. Therefore, the correct answer would be the first choice because it agrees with the verb. Here's a final example using a Written Expression style question:
- The lion, a large member of the cat family in Africa, it is often called "the King of the jungle".
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