<p>The sentence reads : They are always surprised to hear me talk, about my Brazilian friend, Paolo, and the scores of weekdays in a class...</p>
<p>The underlined bit is "talk, about my Brazilian friend Paolo,"</p>
<p>Now, I narrowed it down to two answers</p>
<p>talk about my Brazilian friend Paolo</p>
<p>or </p>
<p>talk about my Brazilian friend, Paolo, </p>
<p>Which one is correct and why? I said the second one because the narrator only has one Brazilian friend, so I thought the commas were necessary. Could someone please explain this? My book said the first one was correct. Thank you :)</p>
<p>If in fact you are trying to specify that your only Brazilian friend is Paolo then the comma is needed and the answer given is wrong but I have not seen the entire passage you are referring to. In phrases like that, coommas are need if you are referring to the one and only person or thing but otherwise not needed. For example: “I went to see the movie The Hobbit last night.” You are simply referring to seeing one movie among many. However, “I went to see Peter Jackson’s latest movie, The Hobbit, last night,” needs the comma because it is the only Peter Jackson movie that is showing these days.</p>
<p>Well the passage was in my ACT book so I can’t really post a link or anything. It was from Mcgraw-Hills 10 ACT tests (I think that’s the name).</p>
<p>Basically, the passage was about this kid going to France as a foreign exchange student and meeting a Brazlian guy named Paolo, whom he became best friends with. (did I use whom correctly? I’m still a bit uncertain with who vs whom). </p>
<p>Is it that the book is wrong, or am I misinterpreting this?</p>
<p>Again I would need to see the entire passage but the fact that the book may have a wrong answer does occur now and then. In other words, don’t be shocked that the book can be wrong sometimes. Who is a subject pronoun, whom is an object pronoun. You used whom correctly because your actual phrase is “with whom” where whom is the object of the preposition with (you have split the preposition from its noun giving you a sentence that ends in a preposition).</p>
<p>Okay, thanks for the reply and thanks for the help </p>
<p>Can I ask one more thing though? In certain sentences, how do I decide if its whoever or whomever?</p>
<p>For example, “You may give the award to whomever you want.” Is it whom because it’s “you may give the award to him. You want to give it to him.” What I mean by this is that in the first sentence, it connects two ideas, and I am using whomever to represent the object in both ideas?</p>
<p>In the sentence “You may give the award to whoever is good enough,” is it ‘whoever’ because you say “you may give the award to him. He is good enough?”
so in the first idea the whoever represents the object, but in the second idea it represents the subject. Am I doing this right? Thank you</p>
<p>Yes, that is precisely the correct thinking. When you break the sentence down into two sentences and it comes out, just like in your examples, as him and him, it is whomever, and when it comes out as him and he, it is whoever.</p>
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