Postsecondary Education Readiness Test (PERT) Practice Test

Identify the fused sentence:

1. I went to the store and bought milk.

2. He took the job, but he wasn't happy about it.

3. It was sunny outside we went to the park.

4. We took a drive out to the lake.

The correct answer is: It was sunny outside we went to the park.

A fused sentence occurs when two independent clauses are joined without any punctuation or a coordinating conjunction, leading to a grammatical error. In the given options, the correct answer demonstrates this characteristic. The sentence "It was sunny outside we went to the park" contains two independent clauses: "It was sunny outside" and "we went to the park." These clauses could stand alone as complete sentences, but they are improperly combined without the necessary punctuation or conjunction. Using a comma before "we" or adding a conjunction such as "so" would correct the sentence and clarify the relationship between the two thoughts. For example, a correct form could be "It was sunny outside, so we went to the park." This modification would create a compound sentence, which is grammatically appropriate.