Bessie Coleman

Today’s ACT question of the day also comes from the English passage about Bessie Coleman.  Our given sentence begins:

After both semesters of the two-semester year
at Langston Industrial College….

If she studied for both semesters of a two semester year, how long did she study?

One year! (Sorry to sneak a little bit of math into our English practice.) The more efficient, less redundant way to communicate the information given by the underlined portion of the sentence would be “one year”.  Choice G, “a year” works perfectly.

Redundancy and wordiness are topics that are tested on both the ACT and the SAT. The shortest answer is not always the correct choice, but you should try to find the answer choice that uses only the words that are necessary to communicate the given information.