This is a classic case of an SC question with a terrible-sounding correct answer. (And if I remember correctly, I got this !&$!^$%ing question wrong the first time I saw it a decade or so ago, for exactly that reason.) But in case you aren’t tired of hearing me say it yet:
sound doesn’t matter on SC, right?
Quote:
(A) Although the first pulsar, or rapidly spinning collapsed star, to be sighted was in the summer of 1967 by graduate student Jocelyn Bell, it had not been announced until February, 1968.
We have all sorts of problems here. For starters, “it” seems to refer to “the first pulsar”, and that makes no sense: “the first pulsar had not been announced until February, 1968”? What the heck does it mean to “announce a pulsar”? You could announce a sighting, but not the pulsar itself.
The use of the past perfect tense (“had not been announced”) also isn’t great in (A). That verb tense needs to describe an action that happens BEFORE some other action in the past. But in this case, it’s backwards: the pulsar was observed in 1967, but then it was announced later, in 1968 – so it’s awfully strange to use the past perfect tense to discuss the 1968 announcement, given the context of the sentence.
That’s enough to eliminate (A). But for whatever it’s worth, there’s other goofy stuff here: why would you say that the “first pulsar…
to be sighted was in the summer of 1967”?? You could say that it “was observed in the summer of 1967” or “was first seen in the summer of 1967” or maybe even “was first sighted in the summer of 1967”, but the version in (A) doesn't make much sense.
But even if you ignore everything I said in that last paragraph, we still have plenty of reasons to eliminate (A).
Quote:
(B) Although not announced until February, 1968, in the summer of 1967 graduate student Jocelyn Bell observed the first pulsar, or rapidly spinning collapsed star, to be sighted.
The biggest problem with (B) is that funky modifier at the beginning of the sentence: “Although not announced until February, 1968….” needs to be followed by the thing that was (eventually) announced – presumably, the observation of the pulsar. But that doesn’t really happen. Instead, the phrase is followed by “in the summer of 1967 graduate student Jocelyn Bell…” And that makes no sense, because neither the summer of 1967 nor Jocelyn Bell was announced in 1968.
So (B) is gone, too.
Quote:
(C) Although observed by graduate student Jocelyn Bell in the summer of 1967, the discovery of the first sighted pulsar, or rapidly spinning collapsed star, had not been announced before February, 1968.
(C) has some of the same problems as (A) and (B). That opening modifier is still a problem: the opening phrase “Although observed… in the summer of 1967, the
the discovery of the first sighted pulsar…” suggests that the
discovery was observed in the summer of 1967, and that’s nonsense.
I’m also still uncomfortable with the use of past perfect tense (“had not been announced”) at the end of the sentence. It’s odd to say that the discovery “had not been announced before February, 1968” unless that action comes before some other action – and it doesn’t, since the pulsar was first observed in 1967.
Finally, I don’t love the way the word “sighted” is used here. It’s structured as an adjective in (C), and “sighted” generally means “having the ability to see” (i.e., not blind) when it’s used as an adjective. So if we say “the first sighted pulsar”, we’re literally saying that the pulsar has eyesight. Sounds cool, but not terribly reasonable.
So we can get rid of (C).
Quote:
(D) The first pulsar, or rapidly spinning collapsed star, to be sighted was observed in the summer of 1967 by graduate student Jocelyn Bell, but the discovery was not announced until February, 1968.
I’ll be honest: I think this sounds lousy. That initial clause (“the first pulsar… to be sighted was observed in the summer of 1967”) SOUNDS redundant. I mean, it just doesn’t SOUND right to say that the pulsar was both “sighted” and “observed.”
But if you’re answering SC based on sound, you’re not doing it right (more on that
here). In this case, there’s actually a pretty good reason the sentence is written the way it is: if it just said “the first pulsar was observed in the summer of 1967”, that would imply that the pulsar Bell observed was the first pulsar that ever existed. And that makes no sense.
So we actually need the phrase “to be sighted” in order to understand which pulsar Bell observed.
And I don’t see anything else that’s really a concern. Let’s keep (D).
Quote:
(E) The first sighted pulsar, or rapidly spinning collapsed star, was not announced until February, 1968, while it was observed in the summer of 1967 by graduate student Jocelyn Bell.
For starters, it’s illogical to say that “the first pulsar… was not announced until February, 1968.” You might announce the
discovery of the pulsar; you wouldn’t announce the pulsar itself.
Second, we still have that problem with the adjective “sighted.” See answer choice (C) for more on this, but it literally suggests that the pulsar has eyesight; if we want to say that it was the first pulsar anybody had ever seen, then we could say something like “the first pulsar to be sighted” or “the first pulsar ever seen”… or something along those lines.
And finally, the sequencing of the sentence is odd. When you read the first half of the sentence – telling us that the “pulsar… was not announced”, we have no context for it yet, since we don’t know when it was first observed by Bell. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but it’s one more reason that (E) isn’t awesome.
So (E) is out, and (D) is our answer.
close
Updated on: 19 Dec 2021, 04:47
35%
(medium)
31%
(01:49)
wrong 
