Question nine-m
Nine months before Rosa Parks made history by refusing to comply with the segregated seating policy on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, a fifteen-year-old Montgomery girl named Claudette Colvin was arrested for the same blank to some historians, Colvin’s arrest led to Parks’s action and eventually to the desegregation of Montgomery’s bus system.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
offense. According
offense, according
offense according
offense and according
Nine months before Rosa Parks made history by refusing to comply with the segregated seating policy
Hard-difficulty · SAT Reading & Writing · Boundaries — Semicolon vs period between independent clauses. Read the question above, select your answer, and check the full explanation below to understand exactly why the correct choice works.
Answer explanation
Choice A is the best answer. “Nine months…offense” and “according to…system” are both independent clauses. Separating them with a period and turning them into their own sentences is the only grammatically correct choice among the provided options.
Choice B is incorrect. This choice results in a comma splice error, which is a punctuation error that occurs when two independent clauses are joined by only a comma. “Nine months…offense” and “according to…system” are both independent clauses, so they need to be either joined by a semicolon, joined by a comma and a coordinating conjunction, or separated by a period. Choice C is incorrect. This choice results in a run-on sentence, which occurs when two independent clauses are joined without punctuation. “Nine months…offense” and “according to…system” are both independent clauses, so they need to be either joined by a semicolon, joined by a comma and a coordinating conjunction, or separated by a period. Choice D is incorrect. This choice results in a run-on sentence, which occurs when two independent clauses are joined without punctuation. “Nine months…offense” and “according to…system” are independent clauses, so we would need to put a comma before the coordinating conjunction “and” to join them properly.
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