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Pronoun ambiguity

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Pronoun ambiguity

by saranshpuri » Thu Mar 27, 2014 4:54 am
32. The scientists noted that rats suffering from the rare degenerative disease had begun to die six months earlier, even though they had shown no signs of the disease then.
ï‚· earlier, even though they had shown no signs of the disease then
ï‚· earlier, but they were not showing no signs of the disease then
ï‚· earlier, no outward signs of the disease had been shown in them, however
ï‚· earlier without any signs of the disease shown then
ï‚· earlier, even though no signs of it were seen in them at that time.

OA : A I have a doubt related to they as it looks like ambiguos to me, although if i go by logic, then They should refer to Rats, but grammatically, They can refer to either Scientist or rats.
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by tathastuGMAT » Thu Apr 24, 2014 5:19 am
Hi Saransh,

Pronoun ambiguity is hardly a deciding factor on GMAT SC. If you find a pronoun ambiguous, you may doubt that option to be correct but you should not decide your choice just on ambiguity. There will certainly be more serious(may be subtle) errors.
Oflate GMAT is giving less importance to pronoun ambiguity.

This Sentence: You should not worry about the pronoun ambiguity here because all(except (D) which is inferior to other choices) the sentences use either "they" or "them" which will refer to the same noun. Also as long as you have a logical noun available for a pronoun you should not worry. Here "they" is definitely logically connected to "rats" but not "scientist".

-tathastuGMAT
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by Bill@VeritasPrep » Mon Apr 28, 2014 12:59 pm
saranshpuri wrote:32. The scientists noted that rats suffering from the rare degenerative disease had begun to die six months earlier, even though they had shown no signs of the disease then.
ï‚· earlier, even though they had shown no signs of the disease then
ï‚· earlier, but they were not showing no signs of the disease then
ï‚· earlier, no outward signs of the disease had been shown in them, however
ï‚· earlier without any signs of the disease shown then
ï‚· earlier, even though no signs of it were seen in them at that time.

OA : A I have a doubt related to they as it looks like ambiguos to me, although if i go by logic, then They should refer to Rats, but grammatically, They can refer to either Scientist or rats.
Grammar is simply a tool for conveying logical meaning. In this sentence, we know the rats suffer from the disease, so "they had shown no signs of the disease" fits if we're describing the rats. It wouldn't work if, for some reason, the sentence were about scientists dying.
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