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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by storms of frogs.

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Bad for frogs, great for the nation of France.

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

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that?

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And here are the potential answers...

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Let’s start the elimination process by nixing the choices that don’t make any sense.

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Because...ya know...as a general rule, sentences that

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don’t make sense are frowned upon in English language circles.

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Option (D) is the worst offender.

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Omitting the underlined portion turns this sentence into gibberish. Check it out:

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"But tornadic waterspouts can reach 100 miles per hour, can still be quite destructive.”

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Clearly we need some kind of word to connect the last phrase to the main sentence.

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Otherwise, no one will know what this meteorologically obsessed writer is talking about.

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OK, now let’s point our lasers at the second nonsensical option: choice (C).

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We’ll read the sentence (C)’s way: “But tornadic waterspouts can reach 100 miles per

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hour, in which can still be quite destructive.”

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Yeah, that sounds weird. This is because “in which” is a preposition used to signal when

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something is contained within something else.

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The final phrase isn’t trying to tell us what’s inside of “100 miles per hour,”

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so we can definitely get rid of option (C).

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Now we’re left with choices (A) and (B),

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which ask us to deal with the never-ending conundrum of “that” vs. “which.”

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Really, it’s not a conundrum because it’s a question with an easy answer.

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We use “that” to introduce a phrase that’s essential to a sentence. See what we did there?

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We’ll say the sentence again minus the final phrase. “We use ‘that’ to introduce a phrase.”

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Something was lost, right?

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If this were all we said before, our sentence would’ve been remarkably unhelpful, because

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it wouldn’t have identified the type of phrases the word “that” introduces.

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Let’s try this test on our sample sentence and see how essential the final phrase is.

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“But tornadic waterspouts can reach 100 miles per hour.” Hm, seems fine to us.

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The part about these winds being destructive isn’t totally necessary to the meaning of the sentence.

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This means that “that” isn’t necessary either.

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Therefore, we can cross out (A) and dub (B) the correct answer, since we use “which”

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to introduce phrases that are nonessential.

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Because who doesn’t already know that 100 mile per hour winds can be destructive?

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