nitesh50 wrote:
Hi Ninja
Based on accounts of various ancient writers, scholars have painted a sketchy picture of the activities of an all-female cult that, perhaps as early as the sixth century BC, worshipped a goddess known as Bona Dea, "the good goddess".
(B) Basing it on various ancient writers' accounts
(E) Using accounts of various ancient writers
I agree that in this particular question option E is way better.
But I was just curious about option B.
I always am confused about the correct usage of the placeholder pronouns.
I then encountered this article:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/pronouns-usa ... 28522.htmlIt sort of helped.
Main takeaways:
A placeholder pronoun on the GMAT must refer to something. It may refer to a "that" clause or "who" clause.
Now When I attempted the above question I was stuck between option B and option E.
Why can't I say that it refers to "that, perhaps as early as the sixth century BC, worshipped a goddess known as Bona Dea, "the good goddess"." ?
If we rewrite the sentence it becomes:
Basing "that, perhaps as early as the sixth century BC, worshipped a goddess known as Bona Dea, "the good goddess"" on various accounts.....
IMO it does make sense.
Can you please shed some light on placeholder pronouns and reasons for incorrect option B?
Regards
Nitesh
Don't worry, you're not the only one who finds this issue annoying. If it's any consolation, non-referential pronouns on the GMAT are extremely rare. Yes, we can dig up one or two questions with a non-referential "it" in the OA, but they're very rare, so this issue shouldn't occupy much brain space.
For anybody who isn't sure what we mean: a "non-referential" pronoun is just a pronoun that doesn't refer to anything in particular. For example, there's nothing wrong with the phrase "it is raining." The "it" doesn't have an antecedent, and just refers to a general state of affairs.
Here's how I'd suggest dealing with the issue: if you see a pronoun with an unclear referent, try to eliminate four answer choices based on more concrete problems first. After all, pronoun ambiguity is not an absolute rule anyway (more on that in
this video). It's only worth worrying about non-referential pronouns -- or potentially ambiguous pronouns -- after you've exhausted every other issue.
And I'll say it again: non-referential pronouns are incredibly rare on official GMAT questions. So if you see a non-referential pronoun, it might be fine, but there generally needs to be a pretty good reason to use one.
And guess what? This question doesn't have one of those reasons. And the pronoun isn't a non-referential pronoun, anyway.
When "it" is non-referential, the pronoun describes a general state of affairs. For example, "It is wrong to tie the front legs of your puppy together," or "It seems that vodka always helps." But that's not the use of "it" in (B):
"Basing it on various ancient writers' accounts, scholars have painted a sketchy picture of the activities..."
In this case, "it" seems to be a concrete entity based on the accounts of ancient writers, rather than a general state of affairs. So logically, "it" has to refer to a noun. The referent appears to be "a sketchy picture," which I suppose makes sense, but because the pronoun comes first, and there's a substantial gap between pronoun and referent, the sentence is hard to interpret on first read.
Is it definitively
wrong? I don't think so. But ultimately, it's just not as good as (E): "Using accounts of various ancient writers, scholars have painted a sketchy picture of the activities..." Now, we have a modifier "using accounts..." which clearly refers to the "scholars," and there's no confusion or ambiguity at all. You might have to reread (B) to make any sense of it, but (E) is perfectly logical and clear immediately.
Sometimes SC is about finding definitive mistakes. Sometimes it's a matter of choice between two options when neither has a clear grammatical mistake. In this case, the clearer and more logical sentence is preferable.
I hope that helps!
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