The Natural History Museum's new dinosaur exhibit opened last month to great acclaim. The exhibit _____ over 40 fossil specimens...

Let's begin by understanding the meaning of this sentence. We'll use our understanding of pause points and segment the sentence as shown - understanding and assimilating the meaning of each segment bit by bit!

Sentence Structure

• The Natural History Museum's new dinosaur exhibit
  • opened
    • last month
    • to great acclaim.
• The exhibit
  • [?]
    • over 40 fossil specimens
      • from the Cretaceous period,
    • including several complete skeletons.

Understanding the Meaning

Let's start reading from the beginning:

The first sentence tells us:

• "The Natural History Museum's new dinosaur exhibit opened last month to great acclaim."
  • An exhibit opened recently
  • It was well-received ("great acclaim")

Now we move to the second sentence about what this exhibit contains:

• "The exhibit _____ over 40 fossil specimens from the Cretaceous period..."

This is where we need to fill in the blank. Let's look at our choices:

• to be featuring
• features
• featuring
• to feature

What do we notice here?

• "The exhibit" is the subject of this sentence
  • It needs a main verb to make this a complete sentence
  • The sentence is telling us what the exhibit contains or displays

Looking at our options:

• "features" is a complete, conjugated verb
• "to be featuring" and "to feature" are infinitive forms
• "featuring" is a participle form

Every sentence needs a main verb that's fully conjugated:

• Infinitives (to feature, to be featuring) can't serve as main verbs
• Participles alone (featuring) can't serve as main verbs
• Only "features" can work as the main verb here

So we need: features

This gives us: "The exhibit features over 40 fossil specimens from the Cretaceous period, including several complete skeletons."

• This describes what visitors can see in the exhibit
• Present tense makes sense because it's describing what the exhibit currently contains

GRAMMAR CONCEPT APPLIED

Main Verbs in Complete Sentences

Every complete sentence needs a main verb that is fully conjugated - meaning it shows tense and agrees with the subject. The main verb cannot be an infinitive (the "to" form of a verb) or a participle without a helping verb.

Pattern:

Complete sentence (with conjugated main verb):

• The museum displays ancient artifacts.
  • "displays" = conjugated present tense verb
  • ✓ This is a complete sentence

Incomplete (with infinitive):

• The museum to display ancient artifacts.
  • "to display" = infinitive form
  • ✗ This is a fragment - needs a conjugated verb

Incomplete (with bare participle):

• The museum displaying ancient artifacts.
  • "displaying" = participle without helping verb
  • ✗ This is a fragment - needs "is displaying" or just "displays"

In this question:

• Subject: "The exhibit" (singular)
• Need: A conjugated main verb
• Answer: "features" (present tense, agrees with singular subject)
• Result: "The exhibit features over 40 fossil specimens..." ✓ Complete sentence

The key is recognizing that "to be featuring," "featuring," and "to feature" are non-finite verb forms (called infinitives and participles in grammar terms) that cannot serve as the main verb of an independent clause.