ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Japan.

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So it also came with sushi, advanced electronics, and twisted game shows.

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Check out the following passage...

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all? created by.

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And here are the potential answers...

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A helpful thing to remember for this question is that all clauses need a subject and a verb.

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Without these basic elements, the clause club is strictly off limits.

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Choice (A), for example, creates an incomplete sentence.

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The way it’s phrased renders “fortune cookies created by a Japanese man”

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as the subject, without leaving any verb to tell us what these Japanese-made fortune cookies did.

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(Though we figure they probably did some fortune telling.)

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We have a strong feeling the verb “created” needs to function as the verb of this clause

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if this sentence is ever going to be complete.

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Choice (D) makes a similar mistake. The phrase “having been created by” absorbs the verb

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“created,” forcing it to help describe “fortune cookies.”

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If we’re going to get a complete sentence out of this deal, we need for the verb to

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do its job and tell us what the fortune cookies did.

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Choice (C) gets us on the right path. Adding the past tense “to be” verb “were”

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finally makes “created” the verb we always knew it could be.

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However, there’s a problem here with tense.

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“Were being created” is in the past progressive, indicating that the creation of the cookies

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was an ongoing process.

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The right answer is (B), since the correct tense for this phrase is the simple past tense,

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which signals that the cookies were created at a specific moment in the past

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and then they stopped being created.

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We would like to think fortune cookies are constantly being fine-tuned, with an eye toward

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developing a super-fortune cookie that can actually predict the future, but we're not holding our breath.

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