[Video] Q39: No change or have protected or are protecting or were protecting

Explanation for Question 39 From the Writing Section on the 2020 March Sat

So for question number 39, our best dancers going to be a has protected. 2 And the first thing that we can do is look and see about subject 3 verb agreement, right? So what is the subject? 4 What is doing the protecting and is it singular or plural? 5 And if we look at our sentence, it says the officials have long argued 6 that the expertise of their curators has protected the sculptures. 7 So what is protecting the sculptures is not the curators. 8 It's not the officials, it's the expertise and expertise is singular, 9 right? And so a has, has, 10 which is singular. So a again is still a good answer. 11 Um, B is plural have, 12 is plural C is also a plural and D is also plural, 13 right? These are all versions of the verb that would go with, 14 they write the plural, a plural subject. 15 Um, and so we can immediately arrive at a, 16 um, just by looking and seeing that our subject expertise is in fact singular, 17 but we can also think about verb tense here. 18 Right? So not only does a have the right singularity, 19 but we can see that we're talking in the past tense, 20 right. Um, the museum have, 21 or the officials have long argued, right? 22 So we say have argued. So we want, 23 um, a verb like to have, 24 and then we want it in the past tense. Right. 25 And if we look closely a, we see that it has a version of 26 the verb have, has has, and then again, 27 it also has a past tense. So AI is definitely the correct answer. 28 And you can arrive there either by looking at the verb tense that's used 29 earlier in the sentence, or by looking at how the subject is going to 30 be singular.