Grammar Unit Test

MERIDIAN™ · © 2026 · original practice items (not real SAT questions). Not affiliated with or endorsed by the College Board. SAT® is a trademark of the College Board.

---

Conditions. Twenty-two items, twenty minutes, one sitting, on a screen. Twenty minutes is about fifty-five seconds an item — faster than the exam's overall pace of roughly seventy seconds, because Conventions items are the ones you are supposed to bank time on so that Information & Ideas can have it.

Nothing is labelled. That is the entire difference between this and the drills, and it is the harder half of the real thing: naming the rule is most of the question. No item announces that it is testing subject–verb agreement, and no item tells you that the plural noun sitting next to the verb is inside a prepositional phrase.

Do not look at the key until all twenty-two are answered. Mark your confidence on each — high, medium, guess — in one letter beside your answer. Items you got right on a guess are not knowledge, and items you were confident and wrong about are the most valuable thing on the page.

The gate: 19 of 22. Below that, the diagnostic table at the end tells you exactly where to go.

---

#PART 1 — THE TEST

1. The kiln reached temperature shortly before dawn ____ the potters began loading it a full hour later.

• A) dawn,
• B) dawn;
• C) dawn
• D) dawn:

2. A crate of surveying instruments and weather-stained field notebooks ____ left standing on the platform.

• A) were
• B) was
• C) have been
• D) are

3. The station's first keeper ____ a former merchant sailor out of Bristol ____ kept the entire log in verse.

• A) , … ,
• B) — … ,
• C) , … (no mark)
• D) (no mark) … ,

4. The colony rebuilds ____ tunnels within days of every heavy rain.

• A) it's
• B) its
• C) its'
• D) their

5. The recipe calls ____ saffron, green cardamom, and dried rose petals.

• A) for:
• B) for;
• C) for —
• D) for

6. Buried under volcanic ash for seventeen centuries, ____

• A) archaeologists uncovered the villa in 1748.
• B) the villa was uncovered in 1748.
• C) it was uncovered by archaeologists in 1748.
• D) the 1748 excavation uncovered the villa.

7. The apprenticeship requires reading the service manuals, shadowing a senior technician, and ____

• A) to log two hundred supervised hours.
• B) logging two hundred supervised hours.
• C) a log of two hundred supervised hours.
• D) that two hundred supervised hours be logged.

8. Each of the four turbines ____ inspected before the storm season begins.

• A) are
• B) were
• C) is
• D) have been

9. The vaccine trial met its enrolment target early ____ however, the results were delayed by a supply failure.

• A) early,
• B) early;
• C) early
• D) early:

10. Passengers ____ who booked before the fare change took effect ____ will not be charged the surcharge.

• A) , … ,
• B) (no mark) … (no mark)
• C) , … (no mark)
• D) — … ,

11. When the auditors finally arrived in March, the ledgers ____ for three months.

• A) are missing
• B) have been missing
• C) had been missing
• D) missing

12. The narrow footbridge over the ravine below the monastery ____ was rebuilt in stone in 1954.

• A) monastery,
• B) monastery;
• C) monastery:
• D) monastery

13. The dispute was settled quietly between the two founders and ____.

• A) I
• B) me
• C) myself
• D) mine

14. The three ____ signatures appear together on the final page of the treaty.

• A) delegate's
• B) delegates'
• C) delegates
• D) delegates's

15. The tour visited Porto, Portugal ____ Bilbao, Spain; and Bordeaux, France.

• A) ,
• B) ;
• C) :
• D) —

16. The battery life of the newer model is considerably longer than ____

• A) the older model.
• B) that of the older model.
• C) those of the older model.
• D) the older models.

17. Trained as a cartographer in the years before the war, ____

• A) her maps of the coastline remain in use today.
• B) she drew maps of the coastline that remain in use today.
• C) the coastline was mapped in ways that remain in use today.
• D) it was her training that produced the maps still in use today.

18. Neither the pilots nor the flight engineer ____ notified of the change in routing.

• A) were
• B) was
• C) have been
• D) are

19. The geologist collected samples from the exposed face ____ and mapped the fault line before nightfall.

• A) face,
• B) face;
• C) face:
• D) face

20. The grant supports not only the excavation itself but also ____

• A) conserving the finds.
• B) the conservation of the finds.
• C) to conserve the finds.
• D) the finds are conserved.

21. Over the past decade the foundation ____ more than six hundred medieval manuscripts.

• A) digitised
• B) has digitised
• C) had digitised
• D) digitising

22. Three of the original drawings ____ all of them unsigned ____ were found folded inside a ledger.

• A) — … —
• B) , … —
• C) — … (no mark)
• D) (no mark) … —

---

#PART 2 — KEY AND EXPLANATIONS

1. B. Two independent clauses; a semicolon joins them. A is a comma splice. C is a fused run-on. D uses a colon where nothing is being introduced.

2. B. Subject is "A crate"; "of surveying instruments and weather-stained field notebooks" is a prepositional phrase and cannot contain the subject. A, C and D all agree with the plural nouns planted next to the verb.

3. A. Non-essential appositive, matched pair of commas. B mixes a dash with a comma. C and D each leave one end open.

4. B. Possessive pronouns never take an apostrophe. A expands to "it is". C is not a word. D is plural, and "colony" is singular.

5. D. No punctuation. "The recipe calls" is not a complete clause, and a verb is never cut off from what follows it. A, B and C each need a complete clause in front.

6. B. The villa was buried, so "the villa" must follow the comma. A says the archaeologists were buried for seventeen centuries. C opens with a pronoun that has no antecedent. D says the excavation was buried.

7. B. Two gerunds set the pattern — "reading", "shadowing" — so the third item is a gerund. A is an infinitive, C a noun phrase, D a clause.

8. C. Each is singular. A, B and D agree with "turbines", which sits inside a prepositional phrase.

9. B. However is a conjunctive adverb and cannot join clauses by itself; the semicolon does the joining. A is a comma splice. C is a run-on. D misuses the colon for a contrast.

10. B. The clause is essential — it limits which passengers are exempt, and removing it would reverse the sentence. Essential information takes no marks. A fences off the limiting information. C and D are unmatched as well as wrong.

11. C. Two past events; the ledgers went missing before the auditors arrived, so the earlier one takes the past perfect. A is present tense. B is present perfect, which would mean they are still missing now. D has no finite verb.

12. D. Never separate a subject from its verb, however long the subject runs. A is the subject–verb comma. B and C would each leave a fragment.

13. B. Between is a preposition and takes the object form; drop "the two founders and" and the ear settles it. A is the subject form. C is reflexive. D is possessive.

14. B. Three delegates own the signatures: plural first, then the apostrophe. A is singular possessive. C is not possessive. D adds a second s to a plural that already ends in one.

15. B. The list items contain internal commas, so semicolons separate the items. A produces four indistinguishable commas. C and D do not divide a series.

16. B. Compare battery life to battery life, not to a model. A and D compare a duration to an object. C uses the plural "those" for the singular "battery life".

17. B. She was trained, so "she" must follow the comma. A puts "her maps" in the attaching position — the possessive in front does not count. C says the coastline was trained as a cartographer. D says her training was.

18. B. With neither…nor, the verb agrees with the nearer subject — "the flight engineer", singular. A, C and D agree with "pilots", which would be right only if the order were reversed.

19. D. One subject, two verbs — a compound predicate, so there is nothing to join and no comma. A is the false comma before "and". B and C both need an independent clause after them.

20. B. Not only… but also must be followed by matching forms, and "the excavation itself" is a noun phrase. A is a gerund, C an infinitive, D a full clause.

21. B. "Over the past decade" runs up to now — present perfect. A closes the action in the past. C needs a later past event to precede. D is not finite.

22. A. Matched dashes around the supplement. B mixes a comma with a dash. C and D each leave one end open.

---

#PART 3 — DIAGNOSTIC

Mark each item right or wrong, then read down the table. The rule is simple and worth obeying: any sub-skill you missed at all goes back into drill. One miss in a closed rule set is not variance, it is a rule you do not own.

#Reading your score honestly

19–22. You own this domain. Stop drilling Conventions — it is a closed rule set with no further score in it, and the time now belongs to Information & Ideas or Advanced Math, where the ceiling is higher. Keep the grammar deck in your review queue and nothing else.

15–18. One or two rules are leaking. The diagnostic will show them as a cluster rather than a scatter. Drill only those, then retake this in a week — spaced, not tomorrow.

Below 15, but you were at gate on all the drills. This is the labelling gap, and it is good news rather than bad: you know the rules and you are not yet naming them unprompted. The fix is not more rules. It is the Grammar Practice Bank worked with the sub-skill tags covered up, and step 1 of the four-step procedure — read what varies across the four choices before you re-read the sentence.

Below 15, and you were not at gate on the drills. You came here too early. Go back to the drills and take the gates seriously.

#One thing to record either way

Put every miss into the Error Log Engine with the rule name and the trap name, not the item number. "Item 18" is not a thing you can review. "Neither/nor agrees with the nearer subject — I agreed with the plural" is.

---

#REFERENCE CARD — UNIT TEST