Sentence Correction

Hello Everyone!

This is a great example of a GMAT question that focuses on pronoun-antecedent agreement and collective nouns! Let's start by taking a quick look at the original question and highlighting any pronouns we can find in orange:

The company will cover the entire cost of the training, required to educate their employees on new rules and regulations, from its in-house fund.

A. required to educate their employees on new rules and regulations, from its
B. requiring it to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from their
C. it is required to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from its
D. required to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from its
E. required to educate their employees on new rules and regulations, from their

After a quick scan over the options, it's clear that we need to determine if we should be using a singular or plural pronoun. Let's look at the original sentence to find what these pronouns are all referring back to:

The company will cover the entire cost of the training, required to educate their employees on new rules and regulations, from its in-house fund.

The subject of the sentence (aka the antecedent) is "the company," which is what we call a collective noun. While you may think of a company as a group of individuals, and therefore plural, you'd be mistaken. Collective nouns are groups that we treat as a singular entity, and they require singular pronouns.

Since we know now that we need singular pronouns, let's eliminate any options that use the plural pronoun "their" in them:

A. required to educate their employees on new rules and regulations, from its = INCORRECT
B. requiring it to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from their = INCORRECT
C. it is required to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from its = OKAY
D. required to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from its = OKAY
E. required to educate their employees on new rules and regulations, from their = INCORRECT

We can eliminate options A, B, & E because they don't use singular pronouns throughout to refer back to the singular antecedent.

Now that we have it narrowed down to 2 options, let's add in the rest of the sentence and check for other problems:

C. The company will cover the entire cost of the training, it is required to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from its in-house fund.
This is INCORRECT because it's a comma splice! You cannot separate two independent clauses with just a comma - they need a semicolon or a conjunction to be properly split apart! So let's rule this one out.

D. The company will cover the entire cost of the training, required to educate its employees on new rules and regulations, from its in-house fund.
This is CORRECT! It uses proper pronoun-antecedent agreement throughout, and there are no issues with the comma use here!

There you have it - option C is the correct choice!


Don't study for the GMAT. Train for it.