Question

On a field trip to the symphony center, the students listen quietly as the violinist talks about playing in front of an audience every night and traveling around the world. She demonstrates how to tune her instrument and playing a simple scale.

Which underlined part of these sentences, if any, contains an error?
A.
No error
B.
about playing in front
C.
traveling around the world
D.
playing a simple scale

Answer 1

D

The error is a parallelism problem in the second sentence. "Demonstrates how to tune her instrument" uses an infinitive construction, so the second verb must match: e.g., "demonstrates how to tune her instrument and how to play a simple scale" (or "demonstrates tuning her instrument and playing a simple scale").