A punctuation question with which tests how a description connects to the rest of a sentence. Read across the blank so you can work out each part’s job. A period or semicolon separates complete sentences; a colon follows a complete sentence and introduces a list or explanation. An extra description takes a full pair of commas inside a sentence or one comma at its end. Test how the parts connect, rather than where you’d pause.
Hints
- Hint 1
Find what the manuscript contains. Read from contains through the blank, then compare that part with the words that follow.
- Hint 2
Look at how the ending connects. What does which refer to, and can the words it introduces stand alone?
- Hint 3
Read from which to the final period. Check how that whole group connects to the words before the blank.
Step-by-step
Test the sentence and the description
Step 1Find what can stand alone
Read the newly discovered manuscript contains through passages. Could those words stand alone as a sentence? Yes, because the manuscript contains two kinds of writing, giving us a complete thought. The choices change the mark before which, so the description that follows needs its own check.
- Step 2
Test the words after the mark
Can the description after the mark stand alone too? Here, which starts a dependent clause, a group of words that can’t stand alone as a sentence. It refers back to the writing already named, and are intermingled tells us more about that writing. This description depends on the first part, so the versions with a semicolon and a period fail the full-sentence test.
- Step 3
Check what the colon would introduce
The colon needs a different check: is which introducing a list or an explanation, or describing words already named? It describes both Classical Latin prose and early Romance vernacular passages, adding the fact that they’re intermingled. A colon can follow a complete sentence, but it doesn’t attach a which clause to the nouns it describes. That’s why the version with a colon fails even though its left side is complete.
- Step 4
Set off the ending
Follow the description through the transition between the two languages, where the sentence ends. This extra description needs one opening comma, because it runs to the period rather than returning to the main sentence. The choice passages, which supplies that comma before the description starts. Choice C.