Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT4) Practice Exam 2025 - Free CAT4 Practice Questions and Study Guide

The best example of a garden path sentence is “The horse raced past the barn fell.” This sentence initially leads the reader to interpret it in one way, but upon reaching the end, the meaning shifts, revealing that “raced past the barn” is a reduced relative clause modifying “the horse.”

Garden path sentences are structured in a way that misleads the reader into an incorrect parsing at first because of their syntactic construction. In this case, the reader might initially interpret the sentence as meaning something about a horse that simply ran past a barn, but then realizes it also needs to understand the falling action associated with the horse.

The other choices, while they may display some level of ambiguity or complexity, do not mislead the reader in the same manner or create the same kind of confusion over the intended meaning. For instance, "Before the police stopped the Toyota disappeared into the night" could be correctly parsed with appropriate punctuation, while "The man whistling tunes pianos" presents an unusual juxtaposition but is interpretable. "The old man the boat" also contains a structural issue but lacks the same level of initial misdirection that characterizes a true garden path sentence.