SAT Boundaries Question

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Question 1 · Hard · Reading and WritingJune 2024 Batch 1 · Q21Boundaries · 0 solved

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tracks comparative price list data for its thirty-eight member countries. For instance, in July 2021, a hypothetical basket of goods priced at 100 US dollars (USD) in the United States would have cost 54 USD and 110 USD in fellow OECD and Luxembourg, respectively. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

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Strategy

Identify whether the country names are essential identifiers of the noun they follow. If they are restrictive appositives (they specify which members of a larger category), do not set them off with commas. Avoid semicolons within a simple noun phrase and be cautious with colons that would interrupt a prepositional phrase.

Hints (open one at a time)

Hint 1

What are the two countries that the amounts map to via “respectively,” and how are they attached to “fellow OECD nations”?

Hint 2

Decide whether the country names are essential (restrictive) or nonessential (nonrestrictive) information following “nations.”

Hint 3

Read the sentence with no punctuation between “nations” and the two country names—does it cleanly and precisely pair the amounts with the countries? If so, that’s the intended construction.

Step-by-step Explanation

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The trap here

The comma pair that changes what a sentence means — Whether the commas go in depends on whether the phrase is essential. The SAT tests the meaning, not the sound.