Sentence Correction

379. In good years, the patchwork of green fields that surround the San Joaquin Valley town bustles with farm workers, many of them in the area just for the season.

(A) surround the San Joaquin Valley town bustles with farm workers, many of them
(B) surrounds the San Joaquin Valley town bustles with farm workers, many of whom are
(C) surround the San Joaquin Valley town bustles with farm workers, many of who are
(D) surround the San Joaquin Valley town bustle with farm workers, many of which
(E) surrounds the San Joaquin Valley town bustles with farm workers, many are

A- "them" is ambiguous as it could refer to green fields or farm workers.

B- I am not quite sure but I think the subject for the verb "surrounds" should be "green fields" and not "patchwork". Hence the verb form "surrounds" is incorrect.

C- verb form is correct and who refers clearly to "farm workers".

D - "which" is incorrectly used for "farm workers".

E - incorrect verb form.


So my guess would be (C).

OA is A

ranji:

I thought "them" is ambiguous could refer to green fields or farm workers, but green fields cannot be in the area just for the season. So "them" refers to farm workers. Moreover (E) should have "whom" rather than "who". (A) indeed is the correct area.

Please do let me know if this makes sense or I am missing something.

rohit10: i think it should be "surround" because "green fields" surround the area and not the "patchwork".

BandN, you are absolutely right.

I would like to point out also that 'patchwork' is one of those irregular nouns that is the same singularly and plural. However because the entire phrase explains that it is a patchwork of fields , the plural 'surround' is correct, which means that choices B and E are wrong. After all a patchwork is less likely to surround a town than green fields are, right?

Next D can be eliminated because of 'bustle' which should be singular since the verb is agreeing with 'town'

Between A and C, A is the better choice because C has 'who' instead of 'whom' to refer to farmers. Actually if C had 'whom', it would be the best choice, so it is eliminated, leaving A.

Danielle,

I have a doubt here...Many places "of" is referred as middleman and advised to be ignored to get the verb (singular/ plural). Now in this case if we consider "patchwork of greenfields" and then ignore "of greenfield" the only patchwork is left which seems like a singular noun. If you say that "patchwork" is considered as singular/ plural then I agree but if you say that we need to consider the whole phrase "patchwork of greenfields" then I have a doubt. In which scenarios shall we ignore the middleman "of" and in which scenarios shall we not?

Thanks

Okay, I took another look at this one, and it is very tricky indeed. I have one revision and a few pointers:

1) One point of confusion here is because of the nature of the specific word in this case, 'patchwork'. It stays the same when singular and plural (because it's understood that a patchwork is made of individual units, like the word money). That makes it more difficult to edit or correct because you must examine the sentence in context. In this case, patchwork is singular, i.e. one patchwork made of a bunch of fields.

2) Two very important rules are necessary to be able to break this down:
a) When subjects and verbs agree, consider the simple subject and simple verb only.
b) The subject of a sentence is not located in a prepositional phrase. Nouns in prepositional phrases are "objects of the preposition", not sentence subjects.
That means the subject of the sentence is patchwork, not patchwork of fields. I didn't mean to imply that fields should be considered the subject of the sentence.

3) Even though fields is not the subject of the sentence, surround must agree with fields. Here's why: surround is not a verb in this sentence. It's an adjective describing the location of the fields, hence it agrees in number with fields -- this is idiomatic, and hard to spot. (I missed it too at the first look.)

4) Look closely at this sentence and you will see that the only verb in the sentence is 'bustles', which is why you have surround, which is plural, and bustles which is singular in the same sentence and it's correct.

Thanks for posting again on this one, and I hope this clarifies your understanding. Please post again if you need to.