ballest127
Hi Expert,
In choice C, why "there were" not " there was" because the preceding clause is "there is now one ...." ?
Please explain.
Thanks.
Here's the version created via the use of (C).
A recent national study of the public schools shows that there is now one microcomputer for every thirty-two pupils, four times as many as there were four years ago.The structure of the sentence is a bit informal. The rationale for the use of the plural "were" in the closing modifier is that "one microcomputer for every thirty-two pupils" is understood to be a plural number of computers.
So essentially this version says
A recent national study of the public schools shows that there are now enough computers that there is one microcomputer for every thirty-two pupils, four times as many as there were four years ago.The sentence version created via the use of (C) is not ideal. It's just much better than the other versions.
One challenge that Sentence Correction question writers face is that of making correct answers not blatantly correct. In order to obscure the correctness of correct answers, Sentence Correction question writers often push, stretch, and even break the boundaries of what constitutes good writing.
In the case of this question, perhaps the writer wanted to make the question at least a little challenging, even though the incorrect answers are pretty blatantly incorrect. So, the writer wrote the correct answer, (C), in a way that could debatably be considered correct, but neither sounds right nor is entirely logical.
Alternatively, the writer may have just decided to be creative with language.
In any case, it's good to be prepared to see some weird and debatably incorrect constructions in the "correct" answers to Sentence Correction questions.