The wild flowers looked like a soft orange blanket _______ the desert

Solution 1:

The answer is A. "a soft orange blanket covering the desert".

You have to consider this part of the sentence separately.

You can say

• X is like Y
• X was like Y
• X will be like Y

for identical values of Y

Update:

The whole sentence is a slightly simplified form of

"The wild flowers looked like a soft orange blanket [which was] covering the desert"

How do we know how to parse this sentence to identify the main verb? Well, you can try various patterns and see which makes sense. I'm no linguist and don't have a good academic understanding of English grammar but I would first break down the obvious elements:

• "the wild flowers" - noun phrase
• "looked like" - verb phrase
• "a soft orange blanket" - noun phrase
• "[which was] covering" - verb phrase
• "the desert" - noun.

Clearly in "looked like", flowers don't have eyes so what is meant is "looked [to me] like" the the author means the "flowers were like something". So this particular verb is the past tense of "A is like B"

To identify the basic structure we can ignore the adjectives (wild, soft, orange) and articles.

We have

  noun verb noun verb noun

So you want to decide whether that is

  (noun verb noun) main-verb noun

or

  noun main-verb (noun verb noun)

In other words whether the flowers cover the desert or whether the blanket covers the desert (or whether it really matters which covers the desert - perhaps they both do and so we don't care which is the main verb, this whole covering-the-desert thing is something that both the flowers and blanket do and that is the point enabling the comparison) The important thing here is not that the flowers cover the desert but that the flowers are like a blanket (the covering-the-desert thing is mere justification for the simile).

Generally word-proximity is a good guide. The flowers are clearly the main subject being described and the nearest verb to the word "flower" is the main one.

We can subjectively test this by substituting "throbbing purple rash" for "soft orange blanket" and notice that the relationship of the first noun to the second is of primary importance in the emotional impact of the sentence. So we can say it is the verb between those first two nouns which is probably the most important of the two verbs.