Writing Questions!!!

<p>From the New BB book. Pg. 837 number 4:</p>

<p>Activist Mumeo Oku campaigned to improve the lot of women in Japan by exposing faulty household products, she successfully demanded that these products be recalled.</p>

<p>The answer was (b): exposing faulty household products and successfully demanded their recall.
I chose (e): exposing faulty household products whose recall she was successful in demanding.</p>

<p>I know (e) is incredibly wordy, but I though the "their" in (b) was ambiguous since it could have reffered to products or the women, even though "logically" the brain would pair their with the products....Could someone explain how they would have gone about answering this question?</p>

<p>Thanks in advance :)</p>

<p>the original sentence obviously is a run on sentence, but reading it, we know that Oku did two things: campaign and demand (since they have the same subject and both use past tense and are therefore parallel). So B correctly combine there two verbs by using “and”.</p>

<p>“their”, when we look back for its antecedant (the noun it to which it refers), is closest to “products”. Also, “women’s recall” doesn’t make sense. You don’t recall women, do you!</p>

<p>The pronoun is not ambiguous: logically, one would deem the referrent to be “products”. Grammatically and likewise, the closest noun of the correct singularity and plurality is usually the referrent, and such is the case here.</p>

<p>aghh. I keep thinking there’s ambiguity…
I know there is no such think about a recall of women, but when I was going through RR, one thing the author kept saying was that ambiguity questions, you can’t think, or logically think aboutt the sentence. I guess I just need to stop overanalyzing things.
Thanks guys :)</p>