[Video] Q1: No change or were ardent rivals. or were an ardent rival. or was ardent rivals.

Explanation for Question 1 From the Writing Section on the 2019 October Sat

Now looking at question number one on the writing section, 2 we can see that the sentence we're looking at here says John Constable and 3 J M w Turner two prominent 19th century English, 4 romantic landscape painters, what was an ardent rival? 5 And so looking at our answer choices, 6 right? We can see that we're deciding here between different versions of the same 7 verb and what really this question is about is SVA or right subject 8 verb agreement, 9 and order to figure out which version were or was, 10 we want to use, we're going to have to look at what our subject 11 is. And so we have to ask ourselves who were, 12 were, or was an ardent rival, 13 right? If we look back at the beginning of our sentence, 14 we see that we're talking about John Constable and J M w Turner. 15 So these are actually our subject of the sentence. 16 Another important note is that we can see that these guys' names is followed 17 by an, a positive phrase. It's followed by a phrase that set off 18 into commas. And whenever you see those types of phrases, 19 a positive phrases set off with commas or dashes, 20 you want to cross them off immediately because whatever's in that phrase is not 21 going to be the subject. It's going to be something outside of the phrase. 22 And when we do that, we see that says, John Constable and JMW Turner 23 blank and ardent rival, right? 24 And we see there's two people here. So wasn't ardent rivaled doesn't make sense. 25 And that's why the best answer is B we're because we're as the plural 26 version and rivals is also the plural version. 27 And so since we have two people, we need to use the plural version 28 of the verb.