Sambon wrote:
KarishmaB Thank you for a great response. Your identification of additional issues in E and clarification of answer A made clear why answer choice A is the better answer.
I had a follow up on the first part of your explanation because I struggled with this concept a few times. Say, I had the following sentence, instead, in which it’s much less likely that the first noun is modified by the “-ed” modifier:
“Many postal workers across the country forced to cope with half as much advertising tax revenue as they did last year lost their jobs.”
I know it’s not all that helpful to look at a single, made-up sentence in a vacuum but I am just trying to nail down this concept. In the example sentence, the meaning of the sentence dictates that it makes more sense that “forced to cope…” modifies “country” and not “postal workers” because the possibility of postal workers receiving advertisement tax revenue is pretty much nonexistent. But at the same time, we have a clue with the plural pronoun “they” indicating that the modifier “forced to cope…” should modify “postal workers.” Since meaning seems to take precedence in this case, would I then be eliminating this example sentence as an answer choice because the pronoun “they” doesn’t agree in number with “country?”
Besides my question, my takeaway from this example is that if you have two nouns that can both reasonably be interpreted to be modified by an “-ed” modifier but a pronoun clue in the rest of the sentence clearly points to one noun over the other, we can confidently say that there is no modifier ambiguity.
Posted from my mobile device SambonThere are lots of problems with the sentence you have shared.
"Many postal workers across the country" - Our subject of interest is "postal workers". We are modifying that by saying "postal workers all over the country". After this, we will likely talk about postal workers.
A non essential modifier (within commas) for 'the country' will be a distraction to the sentence.
An essential modifier (defining modifier without commas) could make sense in certain situations such as
"Many postal workers across the countries facing recession are ..."
"facing recession" defines the countries about which we are talking.
First and foremost, we need to formulate an idea. This idea is what we want to tell the reader. Then we create a sentence to communicate that idea in the best possible way.
I am unable to understand the idea here:
“Many postal workers across the country forced to cope with half as much advertising revenue as they did last year lost their jobs.”
If I am modifying postal workers with "forced to cope ..." it is non-essential modifier so should be in commas. Also, how can the country or the postal workers cope with advertising revenue? Newspapers, magazines, TV channels etc run advertisements for brands and hence generate advertising revenue. Why would postal workers or a country get advertising revenue?
All in all, try to understand the structure of the sentence - what is it that the sentence wants to tell you. After that, consider the best possible presentation from the given 5 options.
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