Which is the best use of punctuation?
a. pole vaulting—and shot put—are olympic track and field events.
b. the industrial revolution (a period between 1750 and 1850) brought many changes to manufacturing.
c. students will study economics, and history throughout the course.
d. the show (was a spectacular event) that people will remember for many subsequent years.

The right option is; B. The Industrial Revolution (a period between 1750 and 1850) brought many changes to manufacturing.

Punctuation is the system of using points or marks in writing, inorder to separate sentences and their elements and to interpret their meaning. Examples of punctuations include bracket [ ], comma (,), apostrophe (’), colon (:), dash (‒), exclamation mark (!), full stop (.) and question mark (?).

The sentence the uses punctuation properly is letter B) The Industrial Revolution (a period between 1750 and 1850) brought many changes to manufacturing.

Explanation:

The sentence in letter B uses parentheses appropriately. They are employed to add a non-essential explanation about the Industrial Revolution. Non-essential means that, if we take such explanation away, the sentence will still make sense: The Industrial Revolution brought many changes to manufacturing.

Letter A is incorrect because it uses dashes unnecessarily. Dashes have a similar function to parentheses. In letter A, they were used to isolate an essential piece of information, a part of the subject, which is an incorrect use.

Letter C uses a comma to separate only two items in a list. If there were three items or more, the comma would be necessary. In this case, it isn't.

Letter D has a similar problem to letter A. It uses parentheses to isolate the subject's predicate, which is an essential part of the sentence. That's why it is incorrect.