Robin Wall Kimmerer of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation is a bryologist, a plant scientist who specializes in mosses. To Kimmerer, mosses are Earth’s most adaptable plants: they can clone blank enter a dormant state in times of drought, and grow in areas that don’t have soil.
Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?
themselves;
themselves,
themselves. And
themselves
Choice B is the best answer. The convention being tested is the punctuation of items in a series. The comma after “themselves” is used conventionally to separate the first item (“they can clone themselves”) and the second item (“enter a dormant state in times of drought”) in the series of things mosses can do.
Choice A is incorrect because a semicolon can’t be used in this way to separate items in a simple series such as this. Choice C is incorrect because it results in a rhetorically unacceptable sentence fragment beginning with “And enter.” Choice D is incorrect because it fails to use appropriate punctuation to separate the first and second items in the series.