Looking up from the base of the mountain, the trail seemed more
treacherous than it really was.
(A) Looking up
(B) While looking up
(C) By looking up
(D) Viewing
(E) Viewed
As written, this sentence would suggest that the trail was looking up from the base of the mountain. Now, this could perhaps work as a metaphor in a poem, but it doesn’t work for an SAT Improving Sentences question. When a sentence begins with a dependent clause, the first word after the comma must be the subject of that clause. Here, however, the first two words of the independent clause are underlined, so we can’t make that change. Which choice will fix this problem? The only one that fixes the problem is (E). The answer is (E).
source: ochs.orecity.k12.or.us
