hey everyone thank you for stopping by and welcome to egmat my name is stacy trapanier and i am
going to be working through this sentence on the weakness of the hypothesis with you we're going to
use the eg matte three-step meaning-based approach to work through this question this is a great
question because it is one of those sc questions that if we use the right approach and we use it
efficiently our route to the correct answer choice is short and sweet so let's get started utilizing
that sentence structure as we begin reading we see plausible though it sounds so i know immediately
something is plausible or reasonable or it sounds plausible or reasonable now right away i see it
sitting here and whenever i see the pronoun it or any pronoun in a sentence for that matter
i always stop and do a double check and because i call pronouns these little demons and the reason
i refer to them as demons in the sentences they really can mess with our meaning so i always do a
pause and check what my pronouns are referring to so plausible though it sounds okay so i'm going to
ask that question well what is it what sounds plausible and i keep reading to find out more
the weakness of the hypothesis okay so it seems that it here is referring to this weakness okay so
possible though the weakness sounds all right keep reading going to get everything together before
i jump to any conclusions the weakness of the hypothesis is that so now i'm going to
get an explanation about what this weakness is the weakness is that it does not incorporate okay so
another little pronoun demon sitting here it does not incorporate so this definitely seems to also
be referring to this weakness it does not incorporate all relevant evidence so the weakness
does not incorporate all relevant evidence that doesn't seem to be making much sense so
i'm going to go back and i'm going to ask that tough question does it make sense does it make
sense to say that plausible though a weakness sounds a weakness wouldn't sound plausible
or reasonable right inherently a weakness is not something that is reasonable now a hypothesis
on the other hand i know is an educated guess and that the hypothesis could sound reasonable
and then i have this contrast and so possibly the author's trying to say that yes the hypothesis
sounds reasonable but it has a weakness and that weakness is that the hypothesis
does not incorporate all relevant evidence so i kind of have to look at my entire sentence i can't
just focus on the underlying portion here because i have pronoun demons playing around in both
portions of the sentence so my logical aspects don't seem to be communicating what my grammatical
pieces are communicating and the meaning that i'm getting from the original sentence
so i have to do a bit of inferencing here so my logical aspects are something sounds plausible
and the hypothesis has a weakness and the weakness is that the hypothesis does not incorporate all
relevant evidence that seems to be the logical meaning behind the sentence but grammatically
as we said these little pronoun demons are messing with this meaning of the sentence and so we have a
pronoun error that's leading to this meaning error because we know a weakness is not going to be
reasonable it's the hypothesis that's going to be reasonable so possibly we could correct this
if we could communicate that even though the hypothesis sounds plausible
it has the stated weakness and what that weakness is so if we could move the hypothesis
over into this subject position then it would get the reference of these two little pronouns it
sounds and it does would both reference that subject hypothesis that would give us the
meaning we are looking for so we are going to go ahead and we are going to move on over
into our answer choices and see if we can find an answer choice that gives us what we are looking
for so choice a is out because those little demons are running amok in our sentence let's take a look
at choice b now this choice might have misled a few of you because of the slight structural change
notice even though it sounds plausible this is a clause and not an opening modifier in this option
but still if we want our pronoun demon it to appropriately refer to hypothesis
hypothesis should follow this clause so it is in that subject position so it sounds plausible that
pronoun should which is a subject in that first clause should refer to the subject in
the following clause which would be hypothesis but that's not the structure we have here
so that pronoun demon it is still messing with our meaning here by referring to the
weakness so this option still gives us that same illogical meaning of the original sentence
so we're going to rule option b out and let's take a look at option c
though plausible the hypothesis is weakness so here we have
a possessive form of hypothesis and the possessive hypothesis describes the weakness here so we still
have the same issue of illogical meaning that the weakness is our subject because hypothesis is
weakness so this is just an adjective describing this so a pronoun demon in the second portion the
non-underlined portion of the sentence is still running amok over there don't forget about that
second demon is that it does not incorporate all relevant evidence that is still referring to
the weakness the weakness does not incorporate all relative evidence and that's not the meaning we
want we want the hypothesis does not incorporate all relative evidence and also we still have
this choicey saying that it is the weakness that is plausible so meaning issues all the way around
choice c is out let's take a look at choice g choice d gets the job done hypothesis is now our
subject which is what we were looking for and the possessive pronoun its that we have sitting here
is referring back to hypothesis and then our second pronoun and that non-underlying portion
is also going to refer to the hypothesis the hypothesis does not incorporate
all relevant evidence so everything is logically referring to hypothesis the pronoun demons have
been put under control so choice d looks like our correct answer choice but we're going to take a
close look at e just to make sure the weakness of the hypothesis which sounds plausible so you
should notice right away that the contrast has been removed giving us an immediate meaning error
so choice is going to be eliminated just for that we also have the use of which here which is
problematic because we're not quite sure which which is referring to is it referring to
hypothesis or is it reaching over here to weakness that's a little ambiguous there's no comma in
front of which which is questionable as far as proper modification so that's an issue and then
we also have that reference of the second pronoun in the non-underlined portion of the sentence
which would also again be referring back to the weakness so choice e is out for a
few errors which leaves us with choice d as our correct answer choice a few quick takeaways for
you always take the time to ask up front does this make sense spending that time with that
meaning analysis is going to make eliminating those answer choices short and sweet for you
pronouns must be logically and grammatically correct watch out for those demons that can create
chaos in your sentence you want to make sure that you understand what everything is communicating
beware of choices that change the structure and remove especially essential portions of
the sentence we saw that that contrast was removed in option e and that messed with our meaning so
if we have a contrast in that original answer or original sentence we want to maintain that
in our answer choice and finally be mindful of how the non-underlined portion of the sentence
interacts with the underlying portion we must look at how everything works together in order
to get to our correct answer thank you so much for solving this question with me make sure you like
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have coming your way grab some helpful resources in the links below there's a few great questions
to help you practice taming those pronoun demons from all of us at egmat happy learning