Magic Mike,

I came across the topic of “gerunds as the subject” today. The example used is; “Playing parlor games such as charades were a popular……”. This error seems easy to spot, but my immediate thought was that in the heat of SAT battle this would type of Q would be tougher. I haven’t been able to find any other examples testing this, or any other mention of it in the book (EM grammar) or on other SAT tutor sites. Is this a high frequency error, should I pursue more examples of it ?

They’re not that common, although I don’t have precise stats to back that claim up. There’s not much you need to know, really, other than that while you should usually be suspicious of -ing words, they can, once in a while, be used correctly as nouns. And of course, since nouns can be subjects of verbs, so can those -ing words.