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Idiom

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by Winner2013 » Thu Oct 24, 2013 6:19 am
For people who have never worked for a living, any job may instill a valuable sense of self-worth and open doors to better jobs in the future.

(A) may instill a valuable sense of self-worth and open doors to better jobs in the future
(B) might instill for them a valuable sense of self- worth and to open doors to better jobs in the future
(C) may, in them, instill a valuable sense of self worth, opening their doors to better jobs in the future
(D) opening the door later for a better job and giving them a valuable sense of self-worth now
(E) may open the door for a better job later and giving them a valuable sense now of their self-worth

Pj
answer to follow[/u]
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by mevicks » Thu Oct 24, 2013 7:21 am
Winner2013 wrote:For people who have never worked for a living, any job may instill a valuable sense of self-worth and open doors to better jobs in the future.

(A) may instill a valuable sense of self-worth and open doors to better jobs in the future
Parallelism maintained, may instill a valuable ... and open ...
(B) might instill for them a valuable sense of self- worth and to open doors to better jobs in the future
Instill For - Idiom issue, parallelism not maintained
(C) may, in them, instill a valuable sense of self worth, opening their doors to better jobs in the future
Pronoun issue - them incorrectly refers to the people
(D) opening the door later for a better job and giving them a valuable sense of self-worth now
Run on sentence
(E) may open the door for a better job later and giving them a valuable sense now of their self-worth
Parallelism not maintained; may open ... and giving
[spoiler]Answer : A[/spoiler]
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by Winner2013 » Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:02 am
Hi Vivek. Yes I understood that it was parallelism issue. But I want to know why is C wrong? As you explained it is a pronoun issue for C. But I feel it is supposed to be for 'people' right?

I mean to say - a job instills a sense of self worth in people. What is the correct idiomatic usage of instill?

Can you help? Don't we say 'Instill IN' ?

thanks for ur time and feedback,
Pooja
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by [email protected] » Thu Oct 24, 2013 12:42 pm
Hi Winner2013,

Answer C has a couple of problems:

1) The phrase "in them" is redundant. The sentence established the subject is "people", so "the job" can only be instilling a valuable sense of self-worth in those people.

2) Parallelism. The 2 phrases in C are "instill a....sense...." and "opening their doors". These phrases don't have the same "format", so they're not parallel.

As to your second question, the phrase "instill in" is redundant. Think about the word "instill"......INstill....it has the word "in" within it, so you don't need another word that says the same thing.

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by Winner2013 » Thu Oct 24, 2013 2:24 pm
Thank you Rich. I guess all this while i was wrong about usage of instill. But I am sure I won't ever forget the correct one now. I did notice the parallelism issue with C but I chose it because it had 'instill in'. :-D Thank you once again for clarifying my doubts.
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