The following sentence is correct:
The news article portrays the land use proposal as reckless; but 62 percent of the town’s residents support it.

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The question asks us to judge the correctness of the given sentence and provides two answer choices. Here is how to evaluate each option carefully.
Option 1: True. This would claim that the sentence is grammatically correct as written. However, the sentence uses a semicolon immediately before the coordinating conjunction but. In standard English punctuation, a semicolon should join two independent clauses without a coordinating conjunction, or it should be followed directly by a lowercase second clause if the conjunction is absent. When a coordinating conjunction like but is used, the typical punctuation is either a comma followed by the conjunction (..., but ...) or a dash for emphasis. Therefore, the form with a semicolon before but is incorrect, making this option an inaccurate judgment of correctness.
Option 2: False. This asserts that the sentence is not correct as written. The primary issue is the incorrect punctuation: using a semicolon immediately before but is not standard usage. The intended meaning could be achieved by replacing the semicolon with a comma: "The news article portrays the land use proposal as reckless, but 62 percent of the town’s residents support it." Alternatively, the semicolon could be used without but, as two separate independent clauses joined by a semicolon, e.g., "The news article portrays the land use proposal as reckless; 62 percent of the town’s residents support it." The presence of the conjunction but after a semicolon signals a punctuation error, so this statement correctly identifies the sentence as not correct.
Additional nuance: the factual claim about 62 percent of residents supporting it is not evaluated in terms of correctness here; the test of sentence correctness centers on punctuation and sentence structure rather than the truth of the supporting statistic. Once punctuation is fixed, the sentence could be grammatically acceptable, depending on the chosen punctuation pattern.
In summary, option 1 mislabels the sentence as correct due to the improper semicolon usage before but, while option 2 accurately identifies the issue and marks the sentence as incorrect as written.

The following sentence is correct: The news article portrays the land use proposal as reckless; but 62 percent of the town’s residents support it.

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