Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, excepting for the

but according to my knowledge independent clause must have subject and verb and i am unable to find subject and verb in this sentence
please help me

Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, excepting for the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

(A) excepting for
(B) except in
(C) but except in
(D) but excepting for
(E) with the exception of

OG16 SC117

egmat and mikemcgarry
Can you please help me splitting up the sentences into clauses. According to the og solution the two clauses here are
1) Mauritius was a British.......200 years
2) expecting...island
Why cant i split it into two clauses this way:
1)Mauritius was...teaching ( being the first clause)
2)the english....island

Hello anandch1994,

Thank you for the query. I will be glad to help you with this one.

Let's take a good look at the sentence:

Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, excepting for the domains of administration and teaching,

the English language was never really spoken on the island.


(subjects = blue, verbs = green)

As you can see, the sentence has above-mentioned two clauses. Both the clauses are Independent clauses (ICs) as the phrase excepting for... just acts as a modifier for the second IC. These two ICs are connected by just a comma. This structure is not correct as two ICs need comma + FANBOYS or a semicolon or a dash in between for grammatical connection.

On the basis of this connection in the sentence, we can eliminate Choice A, B, and E.

Now between Choice C and D, C is the correct answer as it uses the correct idiom except in.



Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha

"except in the domains of administration and teaching" , I want to have clarity on the subject and verb of this clause

Hello Everyone!

Let's tackle this question, one issue at a time, and narrow it down to the right choice! It's a pretty short sentence, so this should be a quick one to answer! To start, here is the original question with the major differences between the options highlighted in orange:

Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, excepting for the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

(A) excepting for
(B) except in
(C) but except in
(D) but excepting for
(E) with the exception of

Okay, to be honest, you could highlight everything in each option because they're short and all different. However, if you look at the entire sentence, carefully, a major clue should jump out at you:

Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, excepting for the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

We have two INDEPENDENT CLAUSES in here with a phrase separating them. Whenever we have two independent clauses in a sentence, what do we need to have to connect them? A conjunction or a semicolon!

Let's take a look at each sentence with the non-underlined parts worked back in. Make sure that there is some way to separate the two independent clauses that is grammatically correct (a conjunction or semicolon):

(A) Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, excepting for the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

This is INCORRECT because there is no conjunction to connect the two independent clauses together. It's actually a run-on sentence with a modifier in between to throw you off! A modifier is not good enough to separate two independent clauses - it MUST be a conjunction or semicolon.

(B) Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, except in the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

This is also INCORRECT because it doesn't have a conjunction to connect our two independent clauses! A modifier in between them isn't good enough!

(C) Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, but except in the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

This is CORRECT! It uses the coordinating conjunction "but" to combine the two independent clauses together to create one complete sentence.

(D) Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, but excepting for the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

This is INCORRECT. While it does use the conjunction "but" to combine the two clauses, we have an idiom problem. The phrase "excepting for" is not an acceptable idiom in English. "Except in" or "with the exception of" are the correct forms of this idiom.

(E) Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, with the exception of the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

This is INCORRECT because it doesn't use a conjunction to connect the two independent clauses. It's one long run-on sentence with a modifier in between, which isn't good enough to work.


There you have it - option C is the correct choice! It's the only one that uses a conjunction to connect two independent clauses together AND doesn't have any idiom issues.


Don't study for the GMAT. Train for it.

Hello Everyone!


This is INCORRECT. While it does use the conjunction "but" to combine the two clauses, we have an idiom problem. The phrase "excepting for" is not an acceptable idiom in English. "Except in" or "with the exception of" are the correct forms of this idiom.

(E) Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, with the exception of the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.


Don't study for the GMAT. Train for it.

Hello Paras237,

I will be glad to help you out with one.


When two words having the same meaning is used in a sentence to convey an idea, redundancy error takes place. For example,


1. He annually participates in a marathon every year.

2. Although she is good in English literature, but she could not score well in the exam.

In both the above-mentioned sentence, we spot redundancy error because annually and every year in sentence 1 and although and but in sentence 2 mean the same and present the same idea.


However, in the context of this official sentence, use of but and except together does not lead to redundancy error because both these words have been used to present two different contrasts as follows.

Contrast 1 = Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years, but the English language was never really spoken on the island.

Contrast 2 = Except in the domains of administration and teaching, the English language was never really spoken on the island.

As you can see, while but presents the contrast with regards to English not being spoken in Mauritius despite it being a British colony for two centuries, use of except tells us that in which areas the language was used.

Remove any of the word from the sentence and you will see that the sentence misses something.

Also, comma + but is required in the sentence to join the two independent clauses -

Mauritius was a British colony for almost 200 years
the English language was never really spoken on the island.



Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha

Hi el1234!

First, "except for" is idiomatically correct, but "excepting for" is not.

There really isn't much difference between "except in" and "except for." Which one you choose depends on the context of the sentence you're adding it to:

I like all Halloween candy, except for the ones that contain caramel.
The character shows up throughout the book, except in chapters 2 and 3.

I hope this helps!