Which of the following is a complex sentence?
A. I would like to visit the Kinshasa, but I understand the city is unsafe for foreigners.
B. Check out the editorial page in today's paper and you'll notice the piece by Oscar Lewis.
C. I simply cannot make heads or tails of rap lyrics, but I suppose I'm just too old to understand them.
D. As Jake was reading the letter from June yet again, the flight attendant coughed gently to get his attention
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A complex sentence is a sentence that contains an independent clause (a complete thought) and at least one dependent clause (a clause that cannot stand alone as a complete thought). By analyzing the options, we can determine the complex sentence.
Option A:
"I would like to visit the Kinshasa, but I understand the city is unsafe for foreigners."
This sentence contains two independent clauses ("I would like to visit the Kinshasa" and "I understand the city is unsafe for foreigners") connected by the conjunction "but." Therefore, option A is a complex sentence.
Option B:
"Check out the editorial page in today's paper and you'll notice the piece by Oscar Lewis."
This sentence contains two independent clauses ("Check out the editorial page in today's paper" and "you'll notice the piece by Oscar Lewis") connected by the conjunction "and." It does not contain a dependent clause, making it a compound sentence, not a complex sentence.
Option C:
"I simply cannot make heads or tails of rap lyrics, but I suppose I'm just too old to understand them."
Similar to option B, this sentence contains two independent clauses ("I simply cannot make heads or tails of rap lyrics" and "I suppose I'm just too old to understand them") connected by the conjunction "but." It does not have a dependent clause, making it a compound sentence, not a complex sentence.
Option D:
"As Jake was reading the letter from June yet again, the flight attendant coughed gently to get his attention."
This sentence contains a dependent clause ("As Jake was reading the letter from June yet again") and an independent clause ("the flight attendant coughed gently to get his attention"). Therefore, option D is a complex sentence.
To summarize, option A and option D are both complex sentences.