Copy this file and paste it into your word processor. Find the 10 verb errors in each of the following paragraphs. Using the following symbols, show how the verbs should be edited.
2A The Flight of the Voyager
1 On December 23, 1986, the Voyager aircraft completed its nine-day, 26,000 mile, nonstop flight around the world. 2 When it land, it became the first plane to circumnavigate the Earth without land or refuel in midair. 3 The importance of this achievement by Dick Ratan and Jeana Yeager, the pilots, has been comparing to the significance of the first powered flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, to the first solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Charles Lindbergh in 1927, and to the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager in 1947. 4 The Voyager designed by Burt Ratan, and it built by volunteers. 5 The flight faces several near tragedies with its nearly fatal takeoff and its turbulent meeting with a typhoon on the second day. 6 Fears of not have sufficient fuel become everyone's concern during the last few days of the flight. 7 Weighing less than 2,000 pounds and carrying 7,000 pounds of fuel at takeoff, the Voyager will undoubtedly have been influenced future commercial and military aircraft design.
2B The Genetic Manipulation of Tobacco
England nearly 400 years ago, botanists have been experimenting with cultivating smoother, more aromatic, and slower-burning tobacco. 2 In the past, tobacco farmers nurture their crops for use in filter cigarettes; today, modern biologists are experiment with the tobacco plant for genetic purposes. 3 By transplant genes from white rats, fireflies, and flowering snapdragons, genetic engineers have produce new varieties of tobacco plants; these varieties can glowed in the dark, resist antibiotics and herbicides, and even poison the insects that are eat their leaves. 4 For genetic engineers, tobacco is a model crop because it was so pliable: the tobacco cells can be easily altered by foreign genes, and a single tobacco cell can be nurture into an entire plant. 5 When a firefly gene was transplant into a tobacco plant in 1986, scientist created a genetic marker that helped researchers monitor transplants. 6 Researchers now recommend that scientists move the research from the laboratories to the farms. 7 The genetic manipulation of crops is not new, and mankind had spent millions of dollars so far trying to understand plant genetics.
[Answer Key] [Go to class at cvc.blackboard.com]
[marsha_chan@wvmccd.cc.ca.us]
Marsha Chan
English as a Second Language Department
Mission College
3000 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95054-1897
(408) 855-5314
URL: http://www.missioncollege.org/depts/esl/