[Video] Q21: No change or there are or there is or their is

Explanation for Question 21 From the Writing Section on the Official Sat Practice Test 4

Now we're looking at number 21. And if we look at our sentence, 2 we see that it says proponents of organic food, 3 of course are quick to add that there are numerous other reasons to buy 4 organic food. Um, and so we're really concerned with, 5 um, the version of there and whether we should say our, 6 or is. And so the question here is, 7 should we use T H E I R or T H E R E 8 and T H E I R is the possessive version 9 of there. So for example, you would say that is their dog, 10 the dog belongs to the person, whereas their T 11 H E R E can be used to, um, 12 talk about location or presence of something. 13 For example, if you were to say there are, 14 or there is fruit in the fridge, right there is it's going to be 15 this version, the presence of something. 16 And so in this case, we're not saying that, um, 17 people possess numerous reasons to buy organic food, 18 right? We don't possess those reasons for simply stating the presence of numerous 19 other reasons. So we need T H E R E, 20 which allows us to eliminate a and D. 21 So now our question is, do we need, there are, 22 or there is. And for that decision, 23 we need to know that our refers to something that's plural, 24 whereas is refers to something that singular, 25 we see that what we're talking about, what there is, 26 or are, are numerous reasons with an S showing us that there are 27 more than one or a plural number of reasons why. 28 And so, since we're looking at reasons, a plural word, 29 we need to choose the plural verb as well, 30 which is our, and so that allows us to choose answer choice B.