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ACT English 4.1 Grammar and Usage 446 Views


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ACT English: Grammar and Usage Drill 4, Problem 1. How would you correct the following sentence, if at all?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:03

Here's you Shmoop du jour, brought to you by spiders.

00:06

That may surprise you, but they're actually pretty good with web based applications.

00:11

How would you correct the following sentence, if it needs correcting at all?

00:14

Even if spiders don't normally harm humans, most people still consider they a nuisance.

00:19

Here are the potential answers...

00:23

For this one we need to know a little something about subjective and objective case.

00:27

Fortunately it's not too hard. So we don't need a brain the size of Texas to do so.

00:31

The subject of a sentence is the person or thing doing something....

00:35

...and the object is the thing having something done to it.

00:39

So in our sentence here, "people" is the subject, because the people are the ones considering doing something.

00:46

This places "they" in the object position.

00:49

Since they're the things being considered.

00:52

The prepositional phrase that kicks off that sentence also lets us know that "they" are spiders.

00:57

But that's not important right now. Unfortunately, for our original sentence however...

01:01

..."they" is in the subjective case, not the objective.

01:04

Therefore we can cross out choice A and continue our hunt for the objective form of the word.

01:09

Choice B doesn't fit the bill either, because "their" is the possessive form of a pronoun.

01:14

We can also eliminate choice D. "These" refers to a choice of two things nearby.

01:19

Since the sentence is referring to spiders in general and not

01:22

spiders in the room with somebody, this is definitely incorrect.

01:25

This leaves us with C, which correctly uses the objective pronoun "them".

01:29

We always encourage people to be kind to spiders.

01:31

Think how much trouble our world would be in right now if somebody had smooshed

01:35

that radioactive spider before it bit Peter Parker.

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