I have a question regarding SC ( Q 93) . The preferred ans is A , although it uses a pronoun it ( the sentence talks about 2 things supreme court and CIA) Although logically in the ans 'IT' refers to CIA, is it correct.
So can we use the following rule which says that the pronoun refers to the closest antecedent in the sentence in case there are more than 2 nouns it could be referring to.
Thanks.
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- RonPurewal
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nope. in that problem, the pronoun actually has a unique referent: the cia.
"it" can't refer to the supreme court, because the supreme court is the subject of the same sentence. if the sentence were supposed to say that the supreme court awarded itself powers, you'd have to use the pronoun "itself" (not just it).
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however, there are occasionally problems in which all of the answer choices do, in fact, have pronouns that are technically ambiguous. (one such example is o.g. verbal supplement #19.) in these problems, if the non-ambiguity check fails, the second line of defense is to pick pronouns that are grammatically parallel to the intended antecedent. so if the intended antecedent is the subject of its clause, then, ideally, you'd have a pronoun that's also the subject of its clause. (notice that you shouldn't think about this parallelism issue unless all of the otherwise correct answer choices fail the ambiguity check.)
"it" can't refer to the supreme court, because the supreme court is the subject of the same sentence. if the sentence were supposed to say that the supreme court awarded itself powers, you'd have to use the pronoun "itself" (not just it).
--
however, there are occasionally problems in which all of the answer choices do, in fact, have pronouns that are technically ambiguous. (one such example is o.g. verbal supplement #19.) in these problems, if the non-ambiguity check fails, the second line of defense is to pick pronouns that are grammatically parallel to the intended antecedent. so if the intended antecedent is the subject of its clause, then, ideally, you'd have a pronoun that's also the subject of its clause. (notice that you shouldn't think about this parallelism issue unless all of the otherwise correct answer choices fail the ambiguity check.)
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