Question

Find the missing sentence:
A. No one knows when tea was first discovered, or how it came to be such a popular drink.
B. ________________________________________________
C. Records going back to the fourth century A.D. refer to tea.

Option A: By the eighth century A.D. Most Chinese were drinking tea, both because they liked it as a beverage and for its medicinal value.
Option B: Tea was so popular that one of the most distinguished poets of the Tang dynasty, a man called Lu Yu, even wrote a holy scripture about it.
Option C: The beverage is generally accepted to have originated in China hundreds of years ago.
Option D: It was called Cha's Ching, which, translated, means Tea Scripture

Answer 1

Hint: Sentence structure refers to the grammatical arrangement of a sentence. Your writing's sentence structure comprises the placement of nouns and verbs within each phrase. Sentence structure is of four types: Simple sentence structure, compound sentence structure, complex sentence structure and compound-complex sentence structure.

Complete answer:
A prior sentence is referenced in the missing sentence. The missing sentence also refers to the sentence following it. In order to figure the sentence missing we have to work our way through the clues. It helps if we recognise the tense, the verb and the subject of the sentence.

Option A: Incorrect choice. This choice states the widespread consumption of tea as a beverage. The preceding sentence states about the discovery of tea and the following sentence talks about the historic timeline of tea. Option A doesn’t fit between the two sentences as it states the preference of tea as a beverage and not its origin.

Option B: Incorrect choice. The writer discusses the origins of tea as a beverage in the preceding phrases, but option B describes how its popularity prompted one of the Tang dynasty's most famous poets, Lu Yu, to create a holy book on it.

Option C: Correct choice. The beverage is thought to have originated hundreds of years ago in China, and depicts how it came to be and where it came from. This is the best option because it does not discuss tea preferences or popularity, but rather how it came to be.

Option D: Incorrect choice. This option is incorrect as it is an informative sentence, which is in continuation of Option B. This tells us about what tea scriptures were called.

Proper order of given sentence
A: No one knows when tea was first discovered, or how it came to be such a popular drink.
B: The beverage is generally accepted to have originated in China hundreds of years ago.
C. Records going back to the fourth century A.D. refer to tea.

Therefore the correct answer is option ‘C’.

Note: We have four types of sentence structures. Each of us uses a unique combination of independent and dependent clauses to ensure that our sentences are powerful, informative, and, most importantly, comprehensible. The first phrase is about how tea was discovered. The second sentence must refer to the country of origin or the point at which it first gained popularity. The remaining options discuss its spread to other countries.

How to avoid errors in sentence structure:
- Take a sentence and run with it: A run-on sentence is one that is excessively long. For example, if a writer forgets to employ conjunctions, a sentence appears to “run on” for an excessive amount of time.
- A fragment sentence is simply a portion of a sentence that lacks a subject, predicate, or independent clause.