Question

The sentence has four underlined words or phrases. Choose the word or phrase that must be changed for the sentence to be correct:

River water pollution is often indicate by algae distribution.
a. pollution
b. indicate
c. by
d. algae distribution

Answer 1

Hint: In order to understand the question easily, try to understand whether the given sentence is in active or passive voice. Then, check the format of the sentence.

Complete step by step solution: In the given question, we have to identify the underlined word or phrase that is incorrect. To do this, let us first understand the subject, object, verb and preposition in the sentence.
The subject of the sentence is ‘river water pollution’ and the object is ‘algae distribution’.
The verbs are ‘is’ and ‘indicate’ and the preposition is ‘by’.
Now, let us identify whether the sentence is in active or passive voice. When the subject does the action, active voice is used and when the focus is on the object, passive voice is used. Hence, the given sentence is in passive voice.
The passive voice is formed with am/is/are + past participle of the verb. In the sentence, we have ‘is’ as required, but the verb ‘indicate’ is not in past participle. Hence, this is the error in the sentence and the correct answer is option ‘B’, indicate. Options ‘A’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ are incorrect; they do not have any errors.
In order to make the sentence accurate we need to turn ‘indicate’ into its past participle form, that is, ‘indicated’.

Note: If you are confused, go through the given sentence and try to identify the part of the sentence that sounds odd. Once found, try to identify the correct form of that word or phrase.