Spot the Error
Note: This is a growing collection of short quizzes in English
grammar. Our starting point is the so-called "NB questions" which
have appeared over the years on examination papers at SDU-Odense
University. To test yourself on these NB questions, click on the link
(e.g. NB1).
NB1.
The weekend staff had arrived and were amusing Marmaduke in the
nursery above; only faintly you could hear his screams and theirs,
and the occasional sickening impact.
NB2. It was a beautiful day, the
leafs were turning, and they instantly spotted what they had missed
before: a very big trunk hidden under the apple trees in the
orchard.
NB3. If China should move on
Indonesia's offshore Natuna gas fields (which lie within the
boundaries of Beijing's claim), Australia's intelligence service may
could come to Jakarta's aid.
NB4. We're ruled by two women
who had leadership thrust on them - who know nothing of politics.
None of them cares about the country, the country we all sang for
when we became free.
NB5. Kenneth is the more young
by a couple of decades but he is by far the more worldly, with his
Parisian, UNESCO, Euroculture background.
NB6. Henriette Raes has a taste
for good things in the life, but a strong aversion to paying for
them.
NB7. In a harsh and bitter
portrait, she depicts a man who lived entirely for himself and used
other people solely for his own pleasure. The 19-year-old boy who had
charmed her into marriage in 1928 grew never up.
NB8. In the bad years of
military rule and economic nonsense Dhaka was not much more than a
big provincial town, with a few cars other than army vehicles; the
main form of transport was the motorized or pedal-driven trishaw.
NB9. Since the 1990s the suicide
rate has jumped dramatically to an average of 59 per year. Last year
60 officers have killed themselves, a historic high. This year could
be even worse.
NB10. The limitations in the
occurence of wh-words (whether captured by constraints on
transformations or otherwise) remains a central example of the
sophisticated types of distributional restrictions that are at the
core of Chomsky's thinking about language structure.
NB11. "I mean - that's life, "
said the young man, "you can't argue with it. It's just one of them
things." He paused, and without fully straightening his body leaned
forward and spat through the open door into the street.
NB12. When adolescence came
Enola did a terrible thing. Thereafter she kept a terrible secret.
Enola had born a terrible child, a little boy called Little Boy.
NB13. In the last century the
hypothetical substance known as aether has made a brief comeback as
the all-pervasive medium through which light waves supposedly
raced.
NB14. She came through at
critical moments, begging food for the "Schindler Jews" from a rich
neighbor and nursing the hundreds, who were shipped frozen and
starving on cattle cars to Oskar's Czech factory in the winter of
1945.
NB15. China considers Taiwan a
province ruled by a band of renegades and demand that Lee refrain
from behaving like a head of state.
NB16. Everybody thought that
Henry was more important than any other player in media and
entertainment - more important even than headliners like Levin and
Disney's Michael Eisner. But he was not the man whom he appeared to
be.
NB17. Keith calmly pocketed his
darts, stepped forward, and slammed me against a heap of packing
cases. Our noses were almost touching again. "You don't never show no
disrespect for the darts, okay?" he said.
NB18. Whatever his deficiencies
as a suitor, Milan's manager does not lack persistence. Manchester
United feel it is about time he accepted "no" as answer in his
pursuit of Eric Cantona.
NB19. This alacrity has made
Murdoch - the much-scorned, much-admired but, mainly, much-emulated
media kingpin - the man to beat in an industry whose rules seem to be
changing almost dailily.
NB20. From
examining how galaxies ebb and flow relative to the general cosmic
expansion additional evidence for large-scale cosmological behaviour
comes.
NB21. This large-scale motion
agrees fairly well - in both its speed and direction - with which was
obtained earlier from the dipole variation in the cosmic background
radiation.
NB22. Looking in certain
directions deep into space, we can find great ensembles of hundred
and even thousand of galaxies tightly packed into a relatively small
corner of existence.
NB23. One night last week, when
the temperature in Des Moines was 20 below zero, Buchanan's
headquarter was packed with volunteers who firmly believed they were
saving the lives of "the unborn" every time they picked up the
phone.
NB24. That light came from the
elemental feminine power: propagation. If Nicola had had that light,
her power had approached the infinite.
NB25. Apparently, the
large-scale foam-like structure is not at all static like styrofoam,
nor it is expanding uniformly like sponge cake rising in the
oven.
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