Princeton 11 tests: Test #2, section 6 #20 error?

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

<p>All right, this is a writing section, and the sentence looks like this:</p>

<p>Emile Zola’s Germinal provides a sociological view of a small mining town in nineteenth-century France.</p>

<p>Princeton’s answer is: E- No error. All the explanation says is “there are no errors in this sentence.” How helpful.</p>

<p>Anyway, I chose letter C, which is the “small mining” portion. I chose this because in this sentence, “small” and “mining” are both being used as adjectives. “Small” is describing “town,” not “mining,” and as such either “small” needs to be changed to an adverb to describe “mining,” or there needs to be a comma after it to denote that it is an adjective describing the noun “town.” </p>

<p>Thoughts?</p>

2

<p>Rule of thumb that I always use to check whether there needs to be a comma between two adjectives is that if you can insert and or but, than usually there should be a comma…but saying small and mining town does not sound right; therefore, I would say the sentence is correct.</p>

3

<p>Mining town is a compound noun, like science fiction. No comma here. </p>

<p>The sentence is correct. No error.</p>

4

<p>I JUST did that section. I got No Error. There was nothing worng with that sentence.</p>

5

<p>Mining town, fishing village, etc are all nouns.</p>

6

<p>There is absolutely nothing wrong with that sentence. You just made a BIG ROOKIE mistake.</p>