Ambiguous Pronouns

Let me show you how.

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As early as 1865, there had been proposals for a New York subway, but that [21] took decades to resolve the many political, technical and financial challenges. The

21. A. NO CHANGE
B. it
C. those
D. DELETE the underlined portion

http://imgur.com/NNGDTLb

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By giving a link to the quoted material, I'm showing that I'm not trying to pass this off as my original thinking, my creation. Plagiarism doesn't preclude quoting others, it only addressing attempting to steal others ideas and works and pretending they are yours.

Pretty fair advice, Jack. So there is a difference between 'it' and 'that'.

LookingSthere is.if you are looking at the act question not his rewrite

I understand now, thank you.

This is the original sentence, apparently from a test prep booklet:

As early as 1865, there had been proposals for a New York subway, but that took decades to resolve the many political, financial, and technical challenges.

This is ACTPREP's rewrite of it:



The rewrite leaves out the whole clause "the many...technical challenges". Omitting that makes it look like "that" must refer to either "proposals" or "innovative carriage", and doesn't really work well with either, for previously disccussed reasons. If it did in fact refer to either of those, either "it" or "that" would have fit, albeit poorly. With the missing clause it's clear that "that" does not in fact refer to either of them, and "it" fits better, again for reasons previously discussed.

Farmer's in fact right. The redrafted statement has serious problems.

And to clarify, this:


should be:

there is, if you are looking at the ACT question, not his rewrite.

I recently got a new phone, and this was the first time I'd tried typing a response on its keyboard, which I discovered is super-sensitive. The potential post kept whizzing off somewhere unknown or turning a corner into the Twilight Zone, or not entering at all. I finally figured that was the best I was gonna get with that keyboard and just posted it warts and all.