<p>From the released Saturday, October 18 PSAT:</p>
<p>Members of the vice-presidential family are permitted to choose paintings from the National Gallery of Art to display in the Victorian mansion that serves as their official residence. No error</p>
<p>I put D (their) because I thought "their" was ambiguous. The correct answer is E (no error). Thoughts?</p>
<p>Apparently paintings do not reside in a mansion. any thought?</p>
<p>Why isn’t it ‘serve as’? What is the singular pronoun?</p>
<p>I see their referring back to the members.</p>
<p>serve as refers to the mansion. Neither members or paintings can serve as residence. (maybe paintings… But that would be pretty interesting) :)</p>
<p>I think that their is ambiguous. We need crazybandit or silverturtle.</p>
<p>I chose their as well, and i am shocked to see that the CB doesnt see it as ambiguous…guess we need silverturtle…quick, do the summoning spell!</p>
<p>The paintings are already at the National gallery, a single location. It makes sense that the mansion would belong to a prominent family. I wouldn’t mark an error because of ambiguity. We’re being tested on explicit grammatical errors, not good writing.</p>
<p>I don’t find their ambiguous at all. Look at the sentence like this:
Members of the vice-presidential family are permitted to choose paintings from the National Gallery of Art to display in the Victorian mansion that serves as their official residence. No error</p>
<p>Members are permitted to choose paintings to display in the mansion that serves as their residence</p>
<p>When the sentence is condensed, I think it’s pretty clear that their refers to the members.</p>
<p>Yea but ambiguous pronouns are defined as pronouns that can grammatically (not logically) refer to anything else in the sentence. </p>
<p>Honestly, even the condensed sentence it is not crystal clear what their refers to.</p>
<p>^above:</p>
<p>i think i tend to disagree; grammar encompasses logic.</p>
<p>another way to help clarify this (besides jeffrey’s condensing) is to substitute the pronoun with any of its possible references - it is obvious that ‘paintings’ do not have residence, and even if metaphorically implied, that’s not what sat grammar aims for.</p>
<p>hey guys,
it is simply subject-verb agreement question.intially,i was triped by the lack of concentration and rushing attitude.
but u all know(paintingS SERVE),plus the pronoun their correctly modifies plural"members".</p>
<p>^ no;
the ‘that’ before the ‘serves’ verb is triggering an adjective clause in this sentence that modifies the noun immediately before the word ‘that’. thus, it is the ‘victorian mansion that serves as their official residence’, not the ‘paintings… that serve’</p>
<p>in short, there are certain things that you cannot eliminate from the sentence without changing its meaning.</p>
<p>many thanks to “acquire” for your correction.this is my damn problem with SAT,
RUSH ,RUSH ,RUSH.i dont know what to do???</p>