A punctuation question with a long opening phrase tests whether you can tell which words belong together. Read around the blank to test sentence boundaries: a colon or a single dash introducing an explanation needs a full sentence before it. Then find the main verb and ask who or what does it. A subject and its verb take no comma between them, however long the subject is. A pause doesn't decide where a mark belongs.
Hints
- Hint 1
Read from the beginning through the inventor’s name and test whether those words can stand alone as a sentence. Which verb gives the sentence its main point?
- Hint 2
Look for who received the prize, then find the whole phrase naming that person. Shorten that phrase to she and test how it joins the verb.
Step-by-step
Find where the subject ends
Step 1Test the marks that need a full sentence
After designing a low-cost water filter tells us what happened before the prize was awarded, but it doesn't give us a full sentence. Does adding the inventor’s name complete a sentence? No: can be assembled belongs to the description of the filter, and we still need a verb that says what happened to the inventor. A colon or a single dash introducing an explanation needs a full sentence before it, so the version with a colon and the version with a dash can't work here.
- Step 2
Find the subject of the main verb
Read past the blank to was awarded the community innovation prize, which gives the sentence its main verb. Who was awarded the prize? The answer is engineer and inventor Sahana Rao, with the rest of the name added in the blank. The title and full name together form the subject, the person this verb is about. The words about designing the filter come before that subject and tell us what the inventor had done earlier.
- Step 3
Shrink the subject to check the comma
Now shorten that entire subject to she. Would we put a comma between she and was awarded? We wouldn't, because no comma goes between a subject and its verb, even when the subject is a title followed by a full name. Mehta with no punctuation completes the name and lets the main verb follow it without a break. Choice D.