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SAT Writing & Language: Who is "they"? 7 Views


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Description:

Who is they? What a terrible sentence. If you watch this SAT Writing video, we'll hopefully redeem ourselves from a grammatical standpoint.


Transcript

00:02

alright shmoopers, were on the fifth one here

00:05

of eleven and we're just gonna kind of

00:07

figure out where we're heading...[man talking fast]

00:14

so basically the sentence should go from

00:16

manufacturing and recycling processes

00:17

for advanced composites to specifically

00:19

they will focus on lowering the overall

00:22

manufacturing cost of advanced

00:24

composites blah blah blah today so

00:26

they're clearly focusing on some topic

00:28

earlier upstream they're somewhere in

00:30

this earlier part of the paragraph let's

00:32

think about how we kind of edit this [people editing docs on computer]

00:34

dock so who is they good question

00:38

it's a trick question in a way because

00:40

there is no they in this paragraph

00:41

anyway it's just one big monolithic

00:44

Institute because that Institute is

00:46

singular it means a singular pronoun

00:49

singular like it not they this see right

00:54

there is also a singular pronoun it's

00:56

actually its own type of pronoun called

00:58

the demonstrative pronoun because it [pronoun list appears]

01:00

demonstrates something but it makes the

01:01

sentence ambiguous because the word

01:03

could refer to all sorts of things in

01:06

the previous sentence it's tempting to

01:07

use they a right there because they're

01:10

obviously people at this Institute that

01:12

is if the robots haven't taken over yet [robots working in manufacturing factory]

01:14

but the essay has treated the Institute

01:16

as a singular act or so far we can't

01:18

assume that only Americans are working

01:20

at the Institute just because it's in

01:22

the u.s. Americans makes it sounds like

01:25

all Americans are focused on lowering

01:27

the cost of making advanced composites

01:29

which we're not quite doing so the

01:31

answer is B it that's it and that [it highlighted in sentence]

01:34

really is it

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