Formative #3-Pronouns

With its towering, six-spired exterior of granitelike quartz monzonite, the Salt Lake Temple is one of the most instantly recognizable structures in the state of Utah. However, many people do not know that _____ built over the course of forty years, with construction beginning in 1853 and ending in 1893.

• it was

• one was

• they were

• both were

Lê Lương Minh became the thirteenth secretary-general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in January 2013, making (a)   the first time the organization would appoint a Vietnamese leader.

• these

• those

• this

• some

British scientists James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in part for their 1953 paper announcing the double helix structure of DNA, but it is misleading to say that Watson and Crick discovered the double helix. ______ findings were based on a famous X-ray image of DNA fibers, “Photo 51,” developed by X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling.

• They’re

• It’s

• Their

• Its

Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s star quilt poems offer an unusually open-ended reading experience. With (a)   eight panels of text stitched together in the shape of a traditional eight-pointed Lakota star quilt, the poems present viewers with a seemingly infinite number of ways to read them.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• their

• it’s

• they’re

• its

Water in the North Atlantic Ocean is pushed eastward by powerful winds, but the rotation of Earth and interference from nearby land masses together cause _____ to swirl into a massive, churning whirlpool—also called the North Atlantic Gyre—that spins clockwise.

• these

• those

• them

• it

American poet Emily Dickinson wrote many of her poems on scraps of paper, but she also took steps to collect these works. From 1858 to around 1864, for example, she copied more than 800 of (a)   into forty homemade booklets (known as fascicles). Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• them

• this

• that

• it

The human brain is primed to recognize faces—so much so that, due to a perceptual tendency called pareidolia, (a)   will even find faces in clouds, wooden doors, pieces of fruit, and other faceless inanimate objects. Researcher Susan Magsamen has focused her work on better understanding this everyday phenomenon.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• she

• they

• it

• those

Official measurements of the Mississippi River's length vary: according to the US Geological Survey, the river is 2,300 mi long, whereas the Environmental Protection Agency records its length as 2,320 miles. This disparity can be explained in part by the fact that rivers such as the Mississippi expand and contract as _____ sediment. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• they accumulate

• one accumulates

• it accumulates

• we accumulate

Scientists believe that, unlike most other species of barnacle, turtle barnacles (Chelonibia testudinaria) can dissolve the cement-like secretions they use to attach (a)   to a sea turtle shell, enabling the barnacles to move short distances across the shell’s surface.

• it

• themselves

• them

• itself

When they were first discovered in Australia in 1798, duck-billed, beaver-tailed platypuses so defied categorization that scientists assigned them the name Ornithorhynchus paradoxus: “paradoxical bird-snout.” The animal, which lays eggs but also nurses _____ young with milk, has since been classified as belonging to the monotremes group. (Difficult Level) Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

• they're

• their

• its

• it's