The MBA Center Grammar Review for the TOEFL - part 6 doc

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The simple sentence is:

The section fills quickly.

The modifiers are:

Although designed to hold more than 100 people, (modifying phrase)

only (adjective)

smoking (gerund adjective)

quickly (adverb)

20-story (noun modifier)

ten-minute (noun modifier)

The prepositional phrases (extra information) are:

in the 20-story building

during the ten-minute breaks.

So, reducing the sentence to its essentials can help you understand how words are being

used. “Smoking” is not a verb, but an adjective. “20-story” and “ten-minute” are adjectives,

not nouns.

Simple Modifiers

Simple modifiers are basic adjectives and adverbs that describe, respectively, nouns and

verbs. Let’s take a moment and look at the problem of word order.

Adjectives

Adjectives can be separated into two categories: fact and opinion. Factual adjectives deal

with color, size, weight, condition, etc. Opinion adjectives deal with judgments and

preferences. Opinion adjectives usually precede factual adjectives.

This is a beautiful new house.

(not: This is a new beautiful house.)

He is a handsome young man.

(not: He is a young handsome man.)

Adverbs

Adverbs describe the way the action of a sentence is performed. They are almost always

in the -ly form. But be careful: just seeing -ly is not sufficient to call something an adverb.

(For example, “lately,” is a time preposition, meaning “recently.”) Adverbs will usually come

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