The practice exercises on this page are designed to help you understand the concepts in this section more fully. These include a set of interactive exercises and a set of more complex exercises. For those looking for more samples to review, you can go to the ANALYZING EXAMPLES page.

The table below contains the interactive exercises for Section 5, covering the key concepts. Each exercise will open a new tab.

Please review the INTERACTIVE ANSWERS page for explanations of select interactive exercises.

Below are two practice exercises that are more complex:

Exercise 1

Analyze the following sentences adapted from Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser:

1. The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society.
   
2. Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average US worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twenty-five years.
   
3. During that period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills.
   
4. In 1975, about one-third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds of such mothers are employed.
   
5. As the sociologists Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning, and child care.
   
6. A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home.
7. Today about half the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants—mainly at fast food restaurants.

• Decompose each Main Verb Phrase by listing the elements in the proper MVP Formula order
• Identify the Main Verb form

Exercise 2

Analyze the following passage adapted from The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan:

Though this simple fact has been obscured, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance,  are fleeting. Many people today are perfectly content to eat at the end of an industrial food chain. To go from the chicken to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal’s pain but in our pleasure, too. If we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat, knowing the high cost of our food chain. In the end, this book is about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure only deepened by knowing.

• Identify each infinitive phrase, past-participle phrase, present-participle phrase, gerund phrase, and prepositional phrase
• State how each phrase is functioning in the context of its sentence

Consult the COMPLEX ANSWERS page to review your understanding of the concepts in this section.