Appositives can cause confusion in structure questions on the TOEFL test because an appositive can be mistaken for the subject of a sentence. An appositive is a noun that comes before or after another noun and has the same meaning.

Sally, the best student in the class, got an A on the exam.

In this example Sally is the subject of the sentence and the best student in the class can easily be recognized as an appositive phrase because of the noun student and because of the commas. The sentence says that Sally and the best student in the class are the same person. Note that if you leave out the appositive phrase, the sentence still makes sense (Sally got an A on the exam).

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Example 1:

_____ George, is attending the lecture.

(A) Right now

(B) Happily

(C) Because of the time

(D) My friend

Answer:

In this example you should recognize from the commas that George is not the subject of the sentence. George is an appositive. Because this sentence still needs a subject, the best answer is (D), my friend. Answers (A), (B), and (C) are incorrect because they are not subjects.

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Example 2:

_____ Sarah rarely misses her basketball shots.

(A) An excellent basketball player

(B) An excellent basketball player is

(C) Sarah is an excellent basketball player

(D) Her excellent basketball play

Answer:

In this example you can tell that Sarah is the subject and misses is the verb because there is no comma separating them. In the space you should put an appositive for Sarah, and Sarah is an excellent basketball Player; so answer (A) is the best answer. Answers (B) and (C) are not correct because they each contain the verb is, and an appositive does not need a verb. Answer (D) contains a noun, play, that could possibly be an appositive, but play is not the same as Sarah, so this answer is not correct.

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APPOSITIVES

An appositive is a noun that comes before or after another noun and is generally set off from the noun with commas. If a word is an appositive, it is not the subject.