In three centuries–from 1050 to 1350–several million tons of stone were quarried in France for the building of eighty cathedrals, five hundred large churches, and some tens of thousands of parish churches.
What does this question test?
This question tests your understanding of the difference in the meaning of “might”, “could”, and “will”. This question also tests your knowledge of pronoun reference. The antecedent that the pronoun refers to must be spelled out explicitly in the sentence.
What does the sentence mean?
This sentence states that during certain time frame (1050 -1350) significant quantity of stone were quarried in France. This was done to build the following:
• 80 cathedrals
• 500 large churches
• some tens of thousands of parish churches
What are the errors in the original sentence?
This sentence does not have any errors. Here is the checklist of main error types:
- Subject-Verb = million tons of stone – were quarried : plural SV pair
- Verb = were quarried: simple past tense
- Pronouns = N/A
- Modifiers = N/A
- Parallelism = There is 1 list as shown in the “meaning analysis”. All elements of this list are nouns and express the structures that were built with this stone.
- Other = “Some tens of thousands of parish churches” may sound awkward and wordy. But this expression is grammatically correct. “Some” emphasizes on the fact that the exact number of these large number of parish churches was not known. Furthermore, “for the building of” may also sound wordier than “to build”. But it is not grammatically incorrect.
Answer Choice Analysis
Choice A: No Errors as discussed above.
Choice B: This choice has two errors:
1: Pronoun Reference: There is no antecedent for “they” in the sentence. Logically, they should refer to the French. However, the antecedent must be present in the sentence.
2: Meaning: The original sentence implies that the large quantity of stone was quarried for the purpose of building the mentioned structures – a fact. However, this choice introduces a sense of possibility by adding the word “might”. Thus the meaning changes from certainly building the structures to possibly building the structures.
Choice C: This choice has similar errors as Choice B does. In addition, it uses incorrect idiom – so as
Choice D: This choice has two errors:
1: Wordy and awkward. “so that there could be built” is unnecessarily written in passive voice. Between Choices A and D, A is a better worded sentence.
2: Meaning: The use of “could” implies that after getting the stone, France had the capability of making these structures. But this does not necessarily mean that France got this stone to actually construct these structures as mentioned in the original sentence. So this choice changes the intended meaning of the sentence. Lets see this difference in meaning using an example:
Tom did cardiovascular training so that he could run the marathon. This implies that Tom is preparing himself for the marathon, but he does not really have any concrete plans for a marathon.
Choice E: This choice has two errors.
1: Pronoun Reference: As explained in Choice B.
2: Meaning: As explained in Choice D.
Thus, Choice A is the correct answer.
What are the key take-away messages?
- The antecedent that the pronoun refers to should be used in the sentence. Even though logically “they” refers to “French”, we cannot use “they” if “French” is not explicitly stated.
- Select the answer choice that conveys the meaning communicated by the original choice.
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