krndatta wrote:
AndrewN Please have a look at my reasoning below:-
Option A:- The meaning conveyed in this option statement is that England had its beginning in 1788. This is not the correct meaning. It was not England, but the exile that started in 1788 for a period of hundred years.
Option B:- Same meaning conveyed as option A.
Option C:- Same meaning conveyed as option A.
Option D:- The first part is between commas. "A period beginning in 1788" is an appositive. So the sentence becomes "During a hundred years, England exiled." We don't know which hundred years are we talking about. Hence, we needed the appositive phrase to be an essential part of the information.
Option E:- This is the correct answer choice. The period began in 1788 for hundred years, and during that period England exiled some criminals. Makes perfect sense.
Share your two cents and evaluation.
Your analysis looks accurate,
krndatta. It is funny to me that everyone seems to want to gravitate to a grammatical explanation to get rid of answer choice (D) when I did not think in such terms. It is not that I am disputing the label, just that rather than think appositive → meaning issue, I started with meaning:
What is the sentence conveying? I read
a hundred years and
a period beginning in 1788 as two separate continuations of the stem
during:
a)
during a hundred years (a strange way to phrase the idea that something occurred
during a hundred-year span)
b)
during a period beginning in 1788 (how long did this period last?)
Such phrasing is not out-of-bounds in written English. We can see sentences with transposable phrases or even clauses:
Sometimes he went out for a run, sometimes he did not. But I digress...
I asked myself why the sentence would need two substandard phrases to convey the vital meaning, and I abandoned the answer choice then and there. (The question took me almost exactly a minute to answer.)
On a separate note, I appreciate the point that
PyjamaScientist was driving at in his earlier responses. Truth be told, I do feel a little overwhelmed sometimes when I see four or five mentions from members in a single day. I feel bound, in a sense, to reply, since I am honored that someone would want to hear my thoughts, yet when those requests start stacking up, I feel like I am playing catchup on homework. As long as I feel I can have fun on the site and help others while participating, I will continue to contribute.
Thank you for thinking to ask me for my opinion.
- Andrew