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Difficulty: MediumCommas with Lists, Clauses, and Coordinate Adjectives

To restore degraded coastal wetlands, environmental scientists planted native salt marsh grasses, installed wooden sediment fences, and monitored water salinity levels over a three-year period.

Which choice for the underlined portion best conforms to the conventions of standard written English?

  1. grasses, installed wooden sediment fences, and monitoredAnswer
  2. B
    grasses; installed wooden sediment fences; and monitored
  3. C
    grasses, installing wooden sediment fences, and monitored
  4. D
    grasses, they installed wooden sediment fences, and

Answer

The choice 'grasses, installed wooden sediment fences, and monitored' is correct because it maintains parallel past-tense verb structure and uses standard serial commas.
The phrase 'grasses, installed wooden sediment fences, and monitored' correctly uses commas to separate three parallel past-tense verbs ('planted', 'installed', and 'monitored') that share the common subject 'environmental scientists'.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the grammatical structure of the sentence.
The sentence contains a single subject ('environmental scientists') performing a series of three actions.
Recognizing that the sentence contains a list of coordinate verb phrases helps determine proper punctuation and verb form.
2
Check for parallel structure among list items.
The first action is 'planted' (past tense). To maintain parallelism, subsequent actions must also be past-tense verbs ('installed', 'monitored').
Items in a list must share the same grammatical form.
3
Determine the appropriate punctuation for separating list items.
Standard commas (including the serial comma before 'and') should separate the three items in the series.
Semicolons are not needed because the list items do not contain internal commas.

Key Concept

Commas with parallel items in a series
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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Topics

Commas with Lists, Clauses, and Coordinate Adjectives

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