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SAT Writing & Language: Who is "they"? 7 Views
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Description:
Who is they? What a terrible sentence. If you watch this SAT Writing video, we'll hopefully redeem ourselves from a grammatical standpoint.
Transcript
- 00:02
alright shmoopers, were on the fifth one here
- 00:05
of eleven and we're just gonna kind of
- 00:07
figure out where we're heading...[man talking fast]
- 00:14
so basically the sentence should go from
- 00:16
manufacturing and recycling processes
Full Transcript
- 00:17
for advanced composites to specifically
- 00:19
they will focus on lowering the overall
- 00:22
manufacturing cost of advanced
- 00:24
composites blah blah blah today so
- 00:26
they're clearly focusing on some topic
- 00:28
earlier upstream they're somewhere in
- 00:30
this earlier part of the paragraph let's
- 00:32
think about how we kind of edit this [people editing docs on computer]
- 00:34
dock so who is they good question
- 00:38
it's a trick question in a way because
- 00:40
there is no they in this paragraph
- 00:41
anyway it's just one big monolithic
- 00:44
Institute because that Institute is
- 00:46
singular it means a singular pronoun
- 00:49
singular like it not they this see right
- 00:54
there is also a singular pronoun it's
- 00:56
actually its own type of pronoun called
- 00:58
the demonstrative pronoun because it [pronoun list appears]
- 01:00
demonstrates something but it makes the
- 01:01
sentence ambiguous because the word
- 01:03
could refer to all sorts of things in
- 01:06
the previous sentence it's tempting to
- 01:07
use they a right there because they're
- 01:10
obviously people at this Institute that
- 01:12
is if the robots haven't taken over yet [robots working in manufacturing factory]
- 01:14
but the essay has treated the Institute
- 01:16
as a singular act or so far we can't
- 01:18
assume that only Americans are working
- 01:20
at the Institute just because it's in
- 01:22
the u.s. Americans makes it sounds like
- 01:25
all Americans are focused on lowering
- 01:27
the cost of making advanced composites
- 01:29
which we're not quite doing so the
- 01:31
answer is B it that's it and that [it highlighted in sentence]
- 01:34
really is it
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