"At least one German, two Italians, and one Spaniard will be chosen for a panel consisting of exactly five people, and no other countries will be represented on the panel."
Q: We can infer that…
Wrong answer: Either two or three Germans will be chosen.
Correct answer: Either one or two Spaniards will be chosen.
Is this prompt meant to say "at least one German, at least two Italians, and at least on Spaniard?" because the syntax as it is makes it true for there to be different numbers of Germans but no other group.
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- ohthatpatrick
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Atticus Finch
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Re: 2017
Yeah, the "at least" applies to all three.
That's an interesting artifact of parallelism .. a root phrase can apply to all the members in the list.
Before I die, I want to go to Canada, Mexico, and Australia.
The bolded root phrase applies to all three ingredients.
For the sentence you're asking about, I think there IS some ambiguity, because parallelism would also allow it to be a list of three quantities: "at least one German", "two Italians", "one Spaniard". But that would be sloppy writing, because of that ambiguity.
If you were meaning what YOU were thinking it meant, you'd say:
"Two italians, one Spaniard, and at least one German" to remove the impression that "at least one" was a root phrase that applied to all three ingredients.
That's an interesting artifact of parallelism .. a root phrase can apply to all the members in the list.
Before I die, I want to go to Canada, Mexico, and Australia.
The bolded root phrase applies to all three ingredients.
For the sentence you're asking about, I think there IS some ambiguity, because parallelism would also allow it to be a list of three quantities: "at least one German", "two Italians", "one Spaniard". But that would be sloppy writing, because of that ambiguity.
If you were meaning what YOU were thinking it meant, you'd say:
"Two italians, one Spaniard, and at least one German" to remove the impression that "at least one" was a root phrase that applied to all three ingredients.
2 posts Page 1 of 1