George Washington Carver's work on soil improvement and plant diseases helped the South and its recovery from the effects of the Civil War.
Is it a simple, complex, or compound sentence?
The easiest way to break this sentence down is to put parentheses around prepositional phrases. Subjects, verbs, and objects are not in prepositional phrases.
George Washington Carver's work (on soil improvement and plant diseases) helped the South and its recovery (from the effects) (of the Civil War.)
This is what you have left:
George Washington Carver's work helped the South and its recovery.
Now can you see what kind of sentence it is?
is it simple?
Right. It's a simple sentence.
This sentence is a compound sentence.
To determine whether a sentence is simple, complex, or compound, we need to look at its structure and the presence of coordinating conjunctions such as "and," "but," or "or."
In this sentence, we have two independent clauses connected by the coordinating conjunction "and." The first independent clause is "George Washington Carver's work on soil improvement and plant diseases helped the South," and the second independent clause is "its recovery from the effects of the Civil War." Since we have two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction, this sentence is classified as a compound sentence.