ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by philosophers.

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What did the philosopher say when his mom asked him to take out the trash?

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Why?

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[ gasp ] [ chuckle ]

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We're reading.. We're reading... We're skimming.

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[ mumbles ]

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Okay, here we go. In line 33, "is"

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refers to which of the following words?

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And here are the potential answers.

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[ mumbles ]

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All right, well the trick here is knowing a prepositional phrase when we see one.

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At their most basic level,

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prepositional phrases are made up of a preposition

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and a noun

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which functions as the object of the preposition.

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All right, so for example, if we slap the preposition "of"

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together with the noun "scorpions,"

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we get the prepositional phrase "of scorpions."

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Yeah we like our prepositional phrases to be a little bit dangerous.

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All right, most of the time, prepositional phrases function like

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adjectives or adverbs

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usually describing things like nouns or verbs.

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So in the sentence

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"John fell into a pit of scorpions,"

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"of scorpions" modifies the noun "pit."

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And "into a pit" modifies the verb "fell." Get it?

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Uh, okay, back to the question at hand.

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To which noun is the verb "is" referring?

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Well, since "is"

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is the main verb of the sentence, it'd better be referring to the subject.

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Right? Or else the grammar police are gonna come down hard on all of us.

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Now that we know how to spot prepositional phrases, we can eliminate

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most of these options really quickly.

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Three - count 'em, three - of these choices are the object

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of a preposition, so they can't be the subject of the sentence.

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Bing bing bing.

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Choice B is wrong because "belief" is the

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object of the phrase "on belief."

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A can go because "realisation" is the object of the phrase

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"in an external realisation."

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And E is eliminated because it's the object of the phrase

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"of the good." So these choices are dropping like flies.

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It'll be easier to find out which of these nouns is the subject of the sentence

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if we scrape away all this prepositional phrase business.

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It's a lot of frosting and we're looking for good cake.

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All right, so now we're down to "insistence is a form."

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Well, it's pretty hard to miss that "insistence" is the subject of the sentence,

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since it's the thing that's doing somethin'. What's it doin'?

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Being a form.

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Sounds exhausting.

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The noun "form" is telling us what insistence is doing,

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making it the direct object.

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So it looks like option C is out and D takes home the prize.

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And before we go, we have to go back to option A.

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We let this slide earlier, but

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"realisation" spelled with an S?

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Like, c'mon, England.

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Yeah, you liked jazz.

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[ buzz ]

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