sat grammar questions are actually pretty simple once you know the rules in this video I'm going to cover every type of grammar question that you're going to encounter on the SAT the first thing that apostrophes can do is show possession and let's look at some examples here because within this there's actually a lot of detailed rules that we need to go over we'll start with singular nouns so your basic normal singular noun all you're going to do is put an apostrophe and then an s so if Juliana has a cat we could say Juliana's cat is really mean but for these weirder ones that are singular but they actually end in an S like the the name James it's one person James but his name happens to end in an s in these cases we have two options we can either put an apostrophe after the s or we can put an apostrophe and then additional s when we say this out loud it sounds the same we would say James's cat is very sweet so a lot of my students have gotten confused about why we would just have an apostrophe there but that is certainly an option so keep that in mind moving on to plural subjects we've got our normal which in this case does end an S it's normal for this to end an S so we could say the cat's tails are so fluffy and because it ends in an S we basically do the same thing that we would do with the weird singular we add an apostrophe after the S keep in mind though we do not have the option of adding that additional apostrophe s for plural endings it's just an apostrophe at the end of the word so the sentence here means there were many cats all of their Tales are fluffy now there's weird ones if a plural noun does not end in an S it is weird the technical term for this is irregular for all my fancy pants students out there you know who you are and for those irregular plural nouns we're going to do the same thing that we would do for singular nouns just an apostrophe and then we add an S so since children is already plural we could say the children's cats have no right to eat my dinner right more than one child is children now there's one more thing to consider what if we have a plural subject but it indicates two individuals for example if we had Maria and Omar what do we do with apostrophes so here it says Maria's and Omar's cats are both beautiful now notice it says individual possession this means Maria has a cat and Omar has a cat and both cats are beautiful we want in this case we want to show possession for Maria and for Omar right but if we have a shared possession Robert and Natalie's cat is ugly there's one cat that belongs to both Robert and Natalie we only need to show possession on the last noun in the list so here we only have two people if you had 10 people we would list all of them the apostrophe would just go on the last noun in that list and that covers all of the possession that you're going to need to worry about on the SAT of course we also have to keep in mind that apostrophes have a second thing they do which is to form contractions this is bringing two words together into and the way that they do this is by sticking themselves in the middle of the new word to replace any letters that we lost so you can see I plus am is I'm right the apostrophe goes right in the middle there it replaces the a that we lost we can see this in a lot of common contractions they' it can work for proper nouns so like even though we could have Dad's possessive we can also do the same thing to say Dad is Dad is would also be dads so the only difference is context if we see dad's going to rescue the cats we know it's Dad is because Dad can't possess a verb right Dad can't possess going but it looks the same so that can be a little bit confusing which is why I bring it up and then there's you know countless contractions that you're probably familiar with so I won't go into them and those are the only two rules for apostrophes but I do want to consider one more thing which is pronouns and I know that we're getting outside of punctuation at this point but it's important because these pronouns end up getting involved with punctuation and sometimes confusing us so I'll show you what I mean its versus its if possession is usually shown with an apostrophe what's going on here which one of these means it's possessive and if you want to take a guess go for it but it's with an apostrophe is going to be it is it's without an apostrophe is actually possessive so this kind of breaks the rule and with these pronouns just remember the contraction is the one that takes the apostrophe if they're battling it out and one of them gets to have the apostrophe it's the contraction that takes it there there and there there's going to be location there with an e is going to be our possessive and again we follow that rule that the contraction takes the apostrophe so they are there is going to be they are and it takes the apostrophe who's versus who you should be able to guess because of that rule I told you which one's going to take the apostrophe that's right it's going to be the contraction who is and then who's without an apostrophe is possessive so those are all the rules for you and I know we worked quickly through that so definitely come back to the beginning of the video use the time stamps and check these rules out again if you need to reference them as we go through these practice problems all right our first example here is rated as an easy one so take a look pause the video try it on your own first but let's talk about it for apostrophe based questions I still put them in the same category as other punctuation questions you can usually get away with just reading the sentence with the underlined portion but every once in a while you might need context to check whether something's supposed to be plural or singular so here we have due to the moon's gravitational pool all right and right there I know gravitational pool belongs to the Moon I know there's only one Moon I could also read this first sentence Earth is not a perfect sphere so I know it's talking about our moon of which there's only one so it would be singular possessive which should just be an apostrophe s which is a and when you're not feeling super confident definitely eliminate answers before you choose an answer I just was 100% sure that was the answer so we're good and I've actually got a Bonus tip for you which is to Boop that like button for me all right let's get things a little bit more challenging here with a medium question this one is one big long sentence so I'll just start from the beginning Slam Poet oo's debut novel The Poet X winner of the 2018 National book award for young people's literature and just to kind of simplify things I'd probably ignore this uh big old comma sandwich here um I might even say this novel or better yet poex poex is composed of poems putatively written by the novel's protagonist um 15-year-old okay and then I would also ignore this because this is extra information so all we're focusing on is are the poems possessive because I'm seeing in the answer choices we have options to make the poems possessive uh we have the word putatively which is not a noun you cannot possess an adverb so I can get rid of B and C for that reason and then the novel's protagonist does the protagonist belong to the novel yes every novel has one protagonist usually so it is that novel's protagonist do we have more than one novel no we know it's poet X this one novel so we need singular possessive a let's do another medium one here again pause it try it on your own first but here we go so this one because we're dealing with pronouns and I can see we've got options between its versus there I am going to read the first sentence CU we need to know what the pronoun is referring to so we have this poet's star quilt poems so star quilt poems is the main subject of that first sentence offer an unusually open-ended reading experience with their eight panels of text stitched together da d d d da I don't care about the rest it it is referring to those poems which is plural which is why I said there out loud so we know it's not B we know it's not D is it possessive or is it they are with they are eight panels reading it out loud makes it pretty clear it has to be possessive and yeah they do they do possess these panels if you know these panels are a part of them so it would be a there possessive all right these next couple of questions here you are not going to be able to find in college board's question Bank you will be able to find them in my new grammar and punctuation online course that I'm working on I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the video but for now pause the video and try this question on your own first I'm already seeing some pretty long answer choices so I'm thinking context might be good to know here I'm going to start from the beginning we get at the entrance of the treacherous dungeon the adventurers pause to consider their options the group's fate rested on their or the groups face rested on its chosen path through the Labyrinth and we can go and stop there ignore the rest of this stuff and as I consider I think I will also ignore that first sentence does the Fate belong to the group or the groups yes so it's going to be possessive so definitely not b and do we have more than one group well it says the adventurers we can infer that the adventurers are you know in this one group together so it's going to be sing singular possessive so we'll get rid of a uh and then it looks like we're dealing with its which might throw some of you off cuz youve think of a group it has more than one person in it right however a group is a singular unit so we do want singular its and then uh chosen path does the chosen path belong to the group yes so we'd want the possessive no apostrophe c as our answer here oh all right last question try it on your own first Jim and Lucas bought a house together I think it's crazy because they've only known each other for 6 weeks and from work mind you that said Jim and Lucas Jims and Lucas their the house is amazing and I hope it works out for them okay so do you remember the rule that we talked about for these types of questions uh first of all do we have any options where they're not possessive no they're all showing some sort of possession um and yeah it's their house right we know that so what is the rule here well they own the house together so we only need possession on the last noun in the list Jim and Lucas's B the first step when dealing with pronoun questions is to find the noun that the pronoun is replacing and that's called the antecedent for all my Fancy Pants students out there so that's going to be step one on this question for example we've got our Blank Space many people don't know blank exists if I go back to the sentence before I see that Arcada is my antecedent so that would be step one step two just match the correct pronoun with that antecedent so if my original noun is arada I have to think is Arcada singular or plural it's singular right and is arada a person so would I use he or she or is arada not a person it's not a person so I'm going to use the singular pronoun it and that's really it that's the two-step process but for some questions it's going to get a little bit more complicated it's not going to be quite as easy to find the antecedent per se so let's do some example problems so that you can actually practice this process let's start with an easy example so step one I need to find my antecedent and for context I usually like to read the whole thing so we get American poet Emily Dickinson wrote many of her poems on scraps of paper but she also took steps to collect these works from 1858 to 1864 for example she copied more than 800 of blank into 40 handmade booklets so just from reading that out loud I can tell that the these works is the original noun that we are replacing and technically these works is referring to poems too regardless both of these are plural so we're going to want them Choice a all right so that first one was obviously pretty easy but now we're dealing with a medium question and with the medium and hard based pronoun questions sometimes you're going to have to focus on or rather not focus on certain parts of the sentence uh here for example we've got the human brain is primed to recognize faces so much so that due to perceptual tendency called something uh blank will even find faces in clouds so this is a little bit more complicated because we've got all this information between our antecedent and our pronoun what can happen is sometimes you'll think you know the the word right next to the blank space is our antecedent uh if you go back we might think that faces is our antecedent so you have to be careful by focusing on context and also looking out for things like non-essential information that you can ignore so like we have this little comma sandwich here that tells tells me I could ignore all of this and then contextually we get blank will even find faces in clouds wood and doors pieces of fruit the first thing we get is the human brain is primed to recognize faces so do faces find faces or does the human brain find faces the human brain finds faces right human brain is singular so we want singular it our answer is C All Right Moving On on to a hard one here now just from looking at the answer choices we can see that there's something a little bit different going on here looks like we might be dealing with possession because I'm seeing apostrophes and speaking of which we're dealing with apostrophes along with pronouns so this is actually starting to bleed into what I would even consider maybe a separate category of apostrophe use I've actually got a video on that so definitely check that out after this if you want more on those types of questions but let's go ahead and do our strategy and I'll start from the beginning here just to get context when they were first discovered in Australia in 1798 duck build Beaver tailed platypuses so defied categorization that one scientist assigned them the name op whenever you've got these scientific words that are way too long just call them by their initials um paradoxical bird snout that's hilarious um but yeah platypuses are pretty weird looking huh the animal which lays eggs but also nurses blank young with milk okay so here it seems pretty clear to me that the antecedent is the animal right nurses young with milk because it does say the animal singular so I would want it right now in this case we have two different options and both of them are its because we're saying it's young it's Young The Young that belong to it um it's young being its babies basically then the question becomes which one of these its is the its that I want and the simple rule to remember with there there its it's and who's who's is that the apostrophe is going to go to the contraction a contraction being when you combine two words together so Choice D for example is the contraction it is and we do not want to say but also nurses it is Young with milk that doesn't make sense right it's with no apost roph is actually our possessive its so our answer here is C and just FYI this video is basically a sneak peek into my SAT punctuation and grammar course which is designed to get you 100% on Standard English conventions the course includes over a 100 practice problems that you're not going to find on college board or anywhere else you can knock the whole thing out in about 3 to 4 hours and if you use the link in the description of this video you're going to get a big old discount so if you don't already have a really good understanding of how all the grammar and punctuation works on the SAT I highly recommend taking that course so in a nutshell the rule with modifiers is that whoever or whatever is described before the comma must come right after the comma and maybe you're thinking what are you talking about what comma well these questions are always going to be easy to recognize because a you're going to get all of the these different answers that start with different subjects and B the answer choices are always going to come after a comma all right so in this sentence for example we have eager to impress his boss at the annual company picnic this is our modifier the part that comes before the comma right and we need to ask ourselves who or what is being described specifically in this sent sentence who or what is eager to impress his boss so just from his boss we know that it needs to be a who we also know it needs to be a male who because it's his right so then some sort of a male person needs to come right after the comma and I'm already showing you how these questions can get a little bit tricky because we have Dave right the problem is Dave is not the subject right after the comma because we've got this guy little apostrophe and if you saw my apostrophe video you're going to know that this means Dave Is possessing something in this sentence so really it's Dave's unfortunate decision and decision is the main subject after the comma since a decision is not the thing that's eager to impress his boss this is according to the SAT incorrect what we would want to do is something like this eager to impress his boss at the annual company picnic Dave made the unfortunate decision to Showcase his juggling skills now we just have Dave after the comma and since Dave is being described before the comma we are good we are following the modifier rule so that is the rule of these misplaced modifiers that you're going to see on the SAT let's do some practice questions real quick so you can solidify this knowledge so we're actually going to start with a medium question here because believe it or not there are no easy modifier questions in the college board question Bank this scares some students away but like I said as long as we follow that rule we should be good do me a favor pause the video I want you to try this question on your own using that rule we just talked about try it on your own first but let's go and get into it so our modifier is far from being modern inventions so whatever comes after the the comma needs to be far from being a modern invention all right uh Choice a says samarians samarians are people not invention so it can't be a b drinking straws drinking straws were an invention so I would keep that one choice C the use of drinking straws oh okay so you can see where these get a little bit tricky so is the use of drinking straws an invention no the the straws themselves would be the invention right so C is not our answer D ancient Mesopotamia is a place not an invention so D is out and just like that our answer is B all right let's move on to a hard one and this will be one of two hard practice questions that we do same deal I want you to pause the video and try this one on your own first but let's take a look known as Earth's living skin biocrusts are thin layers of soil held together by surface dwelling microorganisms such as fungi leion and CB I'll call it fortifying soil and Aid ecosystems against erosion so whatever comes after The Comma needs to be something that is capable of fortifying soil Choice a a recent study's estimate no a recent study's estimate certainly can't fortify soil and honestly I don't even know what fortifying soil is per se but I know that a a stud's estimate certainly can't do it B an estimated 60% reduction in global dust emissions okay so a reduction in dust emissions that is something that happens um which again wouldn't be able to fortify soil so B is also out and just to be clear I don't know what fortifying soil is but I can tell that it's some sort of an actual physical effect on the soil right I imagine it's something like enriching the soil um but basically I know it's a physical palpable thing that's happening to the soil that's why uh I was able to get rid of choices A and B Okay C these crusts all right these crusts now because it says these crusts I do want to go back and see what crusts it's referring to known as Earth's living skin in biocrusts so biocrusts are the thin layers of soil held together by these surface dwelling microorganisms all right so can this physical thing these crusts fortify soil I mean I don't know I'm not a scientist but is it possible yes cuz this is the first actual physical thing that we have that could have a physical effect so C I'm going to keep and then D says a recent study a study cannot fortify soil for sure so even though this is a bit you know scientific and I am not a scientist I was still able to get rid of three answers and confidently choose c as my correct answer all right we got one more hard question here pause the video try it on your own first but let's take a look in the Canon of North African literature Moroccan author dris trabes dris that is a really cool name um the simple past 1954 novel the simple past looms large a Coming of Age story a social meditation and a sober gaze into the dark ma of friendship colonialism okay um so here we have something interesting going on we we basically have like three different modifiers so I could really match up my subject to any of these I'm just going to start with a Coming of Age story because that seems like the the easiest uh least convoluted choice to compare my subjects to so looking at Choice a Morocco is a place not a story so Morocco is out uh Tray's debut novel a novel is a story so I would keep that trabi we know from the first sentence that trabi and I am certainly not pronouncing that right um but this person is not a story this person is the author of The Story So C would also not work published we have a straight up verb a verb is not a story it's not even a subject so that really doesn't work um and just like that we got our correct answer which is Choice B so step one is actually going to take care of most verb problems on the SAT because thus far most questions tend to be subject verb agreement and you're either going to be getting subject verb agreement or you're going to be getting verb tense but this odd verb out Trick is going to work for subject verb agreement questions so step one is to try the OD verb out Trick the trick is we want to figure out which verb is not like the others and the way that we test this is by using they and choosing to use either he she or it I'm going to use it for this example so I would match up with my answer choices they were they have been they are it was notice how was is the only one that goes with it and the others went with they and what I'm testing here is trying to figure out which one of these is plural while the other three are singular or which one of these is singular while the other three are plural so by using they and then either he she or it it makes that process really simple the great news is if you find an odd verb out that OD verb about is your answer you're done right and that's how easy it's going to be for subject verb agreement questions now I did mention that they're not all subject verb agreement questions you will also get some tense questions and some infinitive use although technically you could sort of lump infinitive use into uh a tense as well but basically if there is not an OD verb out then you move on to step two checking for tense so in this case if I try they vow uh I could say they vowed or he vowed right so already just by looking at the first two answers I know there's not going to be an ODB out so at this point it's all about figuring out what the tense is in this question I'm seeing a vow they upheld single past tense so I'm going to know that I want the single past tense vow Choice b as my answer it is really simp simple in theory but if you don't practice it you're not going to be able to get through these questions with confidence so let's get some practice questions in as well all right we've got our first example here and I definitely encourage you to pause the video and try these questions on your own first this video is going to be a lot more helpful if you actually get some practice in but let's go through it so remember Step One is the odd verb out we'll go they reach they had reached or he had reached so I know I'm dealing with tense moving on to step two let's look for context if simple sugars such as this and this blank Earth from elsewhere and survived so right in that same phrase we have and survived so I know I want past tense possibly simple past tense so uh Choice a is simple present tense Choice B is past perfect tense it is a form of past tense so I'll keep that uh Choice C is basically future tense will and choice D is present continuous tense so our only past tense option even though it's not the simple past tense is Choice B which makes a pretty easy answer Choice B all right we got a medium question here same thing pause the video try it on your own first but let's go start with the odd verb out Trick they are taking they have taken they take she takes my OD verb out is D my answer is D just like that all right this one is rated hard go ahead and try it on your own first but let's start with the OD verb out Trick he already served or they already served so immediately I know this is going to be tense so I'll read for context a second generation Japanese American WM blank in World War II and one all right so we have simple past tense one so I know at the very least I need some form of past tense just like the first question we did and I'm specifying simple past tense because a lot of the time you'll want to match simple with simple um but the big takeaway here is let's get rid of any present tense options first so Choice a already ser served so served is going to be past tense right so we can keep that one B was already serving also past tense C already serves that is present tense um and specifically like already obviously doesn't have a tense so I'm focusing more on the verbs right was serving is past continuous serves is simple present tense so C is definitely out and then D had already served this is going to be past perfect tense so at this point this hard question could actually be kind of hard if you don't know what these different tenses are used for in English if you are not a native speaker of English these are probably rules that you need to learn but if you are a native speaker of English if you were born speaking English you should be able to kind of hear what sounds right just by reading things out loud and for the purposes of this video I'm not going to go into great detail about what all the different tenses do but if you would be interested in something like that let me know in the comments All right so a little bit more context this person served in World War II and won two amateur National Basketball Championships when he joined the new New York Knicks for the 1947-48 season okay so this is the clue I was looking for when is going to mean something happened at the same time as this thing that happened in 1947 and then interestingly we get the serving in World War II happens before this right so now we know we're in the past and we're not talking about two things happening simultaneously were basically saying this had already happened when this other thing happened and I just said it out loud I just used the past perfect tense because that's actually exactly what we want to use in this situation so saying it out loud uh WM had already served in World War II when he joined the New York Knicks in 1947 so he had already done this thing when he did this other thing if that makes sense so our choice is D and again if that is just super confusing to you I would recommend a um not a not Choice a but I would recommend first try reading the other answers out loud and simplifying things like I did and you'll see how they don't work so like um if we get rid of this stuff we have WM already served when he joined the New York Knicks and keeping in mind that this is something that happened later see how that doesn't really make sense uh same thing am was already serving in World War II when he joined the New York Knicks like how could he already be doing something in the past when he did something in the future so you see how A and B break down and again if you do want me to do a more detailed video on the different tenses in English like let me know in the comments I just don't imagine a lot of you would be interested in that because this is such a small portion of the SAT but anyway let's do one more hard question all right we've got a hard question try the strategy on your own first but here we go step one OD verb out she hasn't been she wasn't she isn't they aren't OD verb out is D my answer is D and that's right this is a hard question according to the SAT just wanted to kind of show off how powerful that trick is and the good news is like I was saying at least in the exams that we've seen in 2024 most of your verb questions are going to be this type of subject verb agreement question now these questions obviously go hand inand with punctuation questions under the umbrella of Standard English conventions and this video right here is going to cover all of the punctuation rules that you need to know for the SAT