The deer, despite having traveled hundreds of miles to reach the Canad

I’m not crazy about the “despite having traveled… and being free…”, but I’m not 100% sure that it’s wrong. I guess the sequencing makes sense, but it sounds awkward. Then again – “awkwardness” is a lame reason to eliminate an answer choice, especially on the first pass through. (See our beginners’ guide to SC for more on why “awkwardness” shouldn’t be your primary concern.)

But the verb tenses are a legit problem. “The deer… has struggled to acclimate to the habitat that wildlife biologists had predicted would enable them to thrive.” That doesn’t quite work: why would we pair the past perfect (“had predicted”) with an action in present perfect (“has struggled”)? I’d be OK if “has struggled” just said “struggled”, but this version doesn’t work.

More importantly: “the deer” is plural. More on that in a moment. Either way, (A) is out.



Sneaky! “Deer” could be either singular or plural, so you have to let the question somehow “tell you” how to handle it. (Here’s an official example of this concept.) In this case, the word “them” is not underlined, so we know that “deer” has to be plural. So the “it” in (B) is wrong.


I'm OK with basically everything here, except for the verb tenses: there’s no good reason to use the past perfect “had struggled” here, since we have no “time marker” (usually, another action in simple past tense) that occurred later. (C) is gone.


I feel kinda bad for the poor deer, because they’re still struggling in the present. But I can’t figure out why we would use present tense here, considering that we have another action in past perfect (“had predicted”). I think we need simple past tense in this case. (D) is gone.


The “which” looks fine, “they” agrees with “them” later in the sentence, and the verb tense is finally correct. (E) is the winner.