Introduction to Compounds

The northern flying squirrel is nocturnal and is active throughout the year. It is a very social animal and may share a nest and live in groups of eight or more adults and juveniles.

Let's study these two sentences by breaking them up into their parts.

Here is a Subject/Verb/Predicate Adjective pattern.

The northern flying squirrel is nocturnal and is active (throughout the year)

I've bolded the main parts of the sentence, color-coded the adjectives or adverbs depending on what they modify, and put the prepositional phrase in brackets.

The word "and" is a conjunction. It makes this into a compound sentence. You could rewrite it into two simple sentences as follows:

The northern flying squirrel is nocturnal. The northern flying squirrel is active throughout the year.

You can see that this would be hard to read and sound sort of like a beginner book. Conjunctions allow us to join subjects, verbs, complements or sentences together into compounds.

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