- Welcome. This lesson is a little different from the others in this series. This one is fully optional, and it's here to support you only if grammar vocabulary feels a little unfamiliar or if English is not your first language and you need a little bit of a refresher.

So here's what this lesson actually does. It introduces seven grammar words that show up again and again in SAT lessons. It shows you the job each kind of word does in a sentence, and it helps later lessons make more sense when we say things like, "Ignore the prepositional phrase," or, "Make sure the modifier describes the right noun." Here's the big idea.

Every word in a sentence is doing a job. When you understand the job a word is doing, grammar becomes a lot less mysterious, and that's really the mindset we want for the SAT, not, "Wow, grammar is picky and annoying," although we could argue that this is sometimes very true, but we want to adopt for the test a more productive mindset, more like, "Okay, I see this word.

"Now what job is this word doing?" Let's kick it off with nouns. A noun is a word that names a person, a place, a thing, or idea. Some examples: scientist, city, backpack, freedom. Those are all nouns.

On the SAT, nouns matter a lot. Nouns can be subjects. Nouns can show possession. Nouns are often the words that descriptive phrases or modifiers are supposed to describe.

The subject is really important, and the subject is usually a noun. Seek it out. Next up, pronouns. A pronoun is a word that replaces a noun. Instead of saying, "Maria finished Maria's homework," which is wordy and weird, we'd say, "Maria finished her homework." That's a much smoother version.

That word her, the pronoun, is doing the work of standing in for a noun. Some common pronouns are he, she, it, they, and them. And later, when we talk about words like its, their, and whose, the last three pronouns in that example list on the screen, those are pronouns that show possession.

On the SAT, pronouns matter because they have to clearly refer to the right noun, and they have to match the noun logically, and sometimes the test loves to trap students with words that look or sound similar but do different things.

Moving right along: verbs. A verb is a word that shows action or a state of being. So run is a verb. Studies is a verb. Is and were are also verbs. Verbs are a big deal on the SAT because verbs are at the center of a lot of grammar questions.

So if you don't know what a verb is, questions become much harder than they need to be. A very simple way to think about it is this. If the word tells you what someone or something does, you are probably looking at a verb. Next up: adjectives.

An adjective describes a noun. So in red backpack, the noun is backpack, and red is the adjective because it describes the noun backpack. In ancient city, city is the noun, and ancient, the adjective, describes it.

In the next example, difficult is the adjective that describes the noun question. On the SAT, adjectives matter because they often appear inside longer noun phrases and can make sentences feel more complicated than they really are.

Adverbs are up next. These are the words that describe verbs, adjectives, or even other adverbs. So in our examples, ran quickly, the word quickly is describing how someone ran. In very difficult, very is describing the adjective difficult.

And in incredibly slowly, incredibly, one adverb, is describing a second adverb, slowly. Once again, the point here is recognition, not memorizing grammar terms since, hey, the SAT only tests pattern recognition, not grammar terminology.

Next up: prepositions. There are a lot of prepositions. Some common ones: of, in, on, with, by, for. You'll often see prepositions at the start of a little chunk of words like: of roses, in the museum, or with her friends, and here's why prepositions matter so much on the SAT.

They often begin prepositional phrases, and those phrases are very often just extra description. In the subject-verb agreement lesson, for example, you'll learn that a prepositional phrase is a distractor. It adds detail, but it never contains the main subject of a sentence.

So recognizing a preposition can help you avoid some very common SAT traps. And our seventh and final essential part of speech to know: conjunctions. A conjunction connects words or group of words, and we have not one but two full lessons dedicated to the types of conjunctions and their functions.

So this is just a sneak peek at these guys. Words like and, but, or, nor, and because are conjunctions. These matter on the SAT because conjunctions can connect words, phrases, or even whole clauses, and sometimes they affect grammar rules directly which you'll see in later lessons.

So conjunctions are small words, but they can have a big effect on sentence structure. Here's a quick recap. Noun: person, place, or thing, like a city. Pronoun: replaces a noun, something like it. Verb: shows action or being. Is is an example.

Adjective describes a noun like ancient. An adverb describes how, when, or to what extent, like quickly. And prepositions show relationships. Of is an example. Conjunctions connect. And is an example. Ready for a knowledge check?

Take a look at this sentence. See if you can name the following: the main noun, the verb, the preposition, the adjective, the adverb. Go ahead and pause the video, label the elements, and resume when ready.

Welcome back. Here are the answers. Students is the main noun, a.k.a. the subject of the sentence. The verb read describes the action that the students are engaged in.

The preposition in tells us the relationship between the students and the old library. The adjective old tells us that the library is no spring chicken. And, finally, the adverb quietly describes the verb reading. Why is the library not the main noun?

Recall a few slides back when we were talking about prepositions, and I said that a main noun will never be the noun in a prepositional phrase. So the old library is sitting inside a phrase that begins with the preposition in, and that means it's inside the prepositional phrase in the old library.

Therefore, library cannot be the main noun of the sentence. If that still feels confusing, no worries. We will revisit this concept in other lessons. As for this lesson, it's time for final takeaways. You do not need to memorize every grammar term in English. You do need to recognize a few common word jobs.

Knowing those jobs will make later SAT lessons much easier to follow. Thanks for watching.