KittyDoodles wrote:
Hi
AjiteshArunIn option C, does the phrase "Although never sighted" refer to dark spots? Thus the sentence means "Although dark spots have never been sighted at the Sun???s poles or equator, Sunspots appear on the surface of the Sun as dark spots"
Thanks
Kitty
In this sentence you have two nouns, "sunspots" and "dark spots (on the surface of the sun)". These two nouns—or, more precisely, this one noun and one noun phrase—both refer to precisely the same set of visible features of our Sun.
The references are precisely identical—in other words, "if you made a Venn diagram for them, it would be one circle" (something you often hear sarcastically in political discussions, but here I'm using it literally)—because the one that appears second (dark spots...) is a detailed definition/identification of "sunspots".
Because we have two nouns that represent the same set of phenomena, you have more flexibility than usual grammatically. Any verb whose subject, as determined from context, is
those things can take either of those two instances, "sunspots" or "dark spots...", as its actual grammatical subject.
If you had a "they" or "them" or "their", you could conceive of a technical ambiguity here, but that ambiguity would exist only in algebraic-type terms where two things can't be the same unless they're literally the same word. That isn't actually ambiguity (since the 'two meanings' are just one meaning), and any such pronoun would be perfectly fine.