Which sentence characteristic makes the sentence 'The winning goal was scored by my brother.' tough to understand?

• A. Number of Embeddings
• B. Distance between crucial elements
• C. Order of Major Sentence Elements
• D. Number of Propositions

Answer: (C)

Understanding how the order of the main parts of a sentence affects comprehension helps you read sentences in different voices. In English, people expect the usual sequence: who does the action (the agent), what is done (the verb), and what is affected (the object). In this example, the thing that receives the action—the winning goal—is placed at the front, while the agent, my brother, appears later in a by-phrase after the verb phrase “was scored.” This is a passive construction, where the focus shifts from the agent to the recipient of the action, so the typical order is disrupted. That disruption—the rearrangement of the major sentence elements—can momentarily throw you off and require reanalysis to understand who did what. Passive voice often has this effect, which is why the order of major sentence elements is the factor that makes the sentence tougher to understand.

There aren’t embedded clauses here, and the sentence expresses a single action. The distance between parts isn’t the main issue, and it isn’t about how many propositions are present. The key difficulty comes from the altered order of the main sentence parts in a passive construction.