relative pronoun doubt

Dear Teerex,

I'm happy to respond.

First of all, my friend, if you are going to ask a question about something stated in a book, ALWAYS give more information about that book (e.g. the publisher) and ALWAYS give the exact page number & citation. ALWAYS make the blanket assumption that if there's something in a book that you don't understand, it may well be true that an expert will have to look at the book itself, look at the context of what you quoted, to answer your question.

As it happens, I know this MGMAT book well, and I found your sentence on page 34, question #5 in Drill 2.3. I simply want you to appreciate that the way you asked the question made me do the work for which you should have taken responsibility yourself. Learning is all about taking responsibility. If any student views anyone other than himself as 100% responsible for his own GMAT success, that student simply will not have success. Responsibility is crucial.

I have looked at that chapter. If you notice on pp. 30-31, in their list of "Categories of Pronouns," the MGMAT folks didn't even mention relative pronouns. That's a more difficult idea--in fact, it would be a totally mind-boggling idea for a beginner who is just trying to wrap his mind around what a pronoun is. For simplicity, they omitted relative pronouns in this discussion. Since they didn't teach it, they didn't test it in the exercises (it's always a move that could be viewed as unfair to test what we don't teach!)

You obviously have a more advanced understanding. You understand that there are relative pronouns and your recognize them. In fact, you are 100% correct---in the phrase
. . . the new toy that Joey bought for it. . .
the word "that" is a relative pronoun that opens a relative clause, a noun-modifying clause that modifies "the new toy."

You have a more advanced understanding and you were reading beginner level material and were getting confused because you knew things not discussed at the beginner level. Again, you need to take responsibility for where you are in your own understanding, taking nothing for granted, but at the same time, recognizing that material for beginners is what it is--of course it will not include more advanced ideas that you may know.

Does all this make sense?
Mike