[Video] Q36: No change or they were or it were or it is

Explanation for Question 36 From the Writing Section on the 2020 October Sat

So question 36 is referring to a sentence where we talk about CO2 and 2 it says plants would absorb and metabolize the CO2 as 3 though blank, regular CO2, 4 and then researchers would track it. Okay. 5 So the first thing we can ask is what is acting 6 as though it were regular CO2, 7 right? Is it a plural thing or is it a singular thing? 8 And so what they're doing is they're metabolizing C 14 CO2 9 as though it was regular CO2, right? C 14 CO2 is not regular CO2. 10 It's different because as the 14 and see 14 CO2 is a singular 11 subject, not a plural subject. And so anything that's plural we can get rid 12 of, which would be answer choice a and answer choice B. 13 We want to be left with the it's. Right. And now our question is, 14 is it, it is, or where is this something happening in the past or 15 the present? 16 And so we can read up a little bit in the paragraph to figure 17 out if we're talking about past or present. And we see if we start 18 here right about here, 19 key to their early experiments was a technique called carbon labeling 20 which loud. So we can see we got some past Calvin and Betson to 21 determine whether plants need light exposure while they break down carbon dioxide. 22 As it uses carbon atoms to construct sugars, 23 they decided to use variation of the ordinary atoms and be replaced with carbon 24 14. The plants would would. 25 So this is also passed absorb and metabolize CO2 as if it were 26 right. We're going to choose work here. Cause words passed and all these 27 other examples of verbs are in the past test tense. 28 So we want to be consistent if we say pass before we need to 29 say pass after. And so our best answer is going to be C.