Agatha Christie

[nikhilgupta2020]

Source of the question: MGMAT CAT 5A

With her archaeologist husband, travels inspired several mystery novels by Agatha Christie; travelers to Egypt can still stay at the Old Cataract Hotel, the model for the hotel in one of Christie's most famous books.

With her archaeologist husband, travels inspired several mystery novels by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie used her travels with her archaeologist husband to inspire several mystery novels

Because her husband was an archaeologist, Agatha Christie was able to use their travels as inspiration for several of her mystery novels

Together with her archaeologist husband, Agatha Christie was inspired to incorporate their travel into several of her mystery novels

Agatha Christie's travels with her archaeologist husband served as inspiration for several of her mystery novels

The correct answer is given as E. Clearly E is wrong as the pronoun 'her' does not have a clear referent

[tim]

Really? i have to admit that my first inclination is to think this is a joke, but i'll go ahead and bite because at least there is an issue here that i think others can benefit from..

When considering pronouns, we need to look for an antecedent of course, and the pronoun must have a unique antecedent. Thus we discard an answer choice if it has either no potential antecedents or if it has more than one viable antecedent. If the original poster is serious (and i'm still not convinced), he or she must be able to argue one of those alternatives. Let's go through the process:

The pronoun is "her", so we are looking for SOME biological organism in the sentence that COULD potentially be of the female gender. A quick scan of the sentence suggests that Agatha Christie is most likely a biological organism, and we are not 100% sure she is not a female, so we rule out the possibility that there are NO possible antecedents. :) Now we ask ourselves whether there are multiple antecedents. The husband is linguistically defined to be a male, and travelers are plural, so neither of those nouns can match with "her". Thus we are left with a unique antecedent..

One other thing worth noting, if only so i don't have to do it later, is that Agatha Christie is presented in the possessive case in the sentence. This, however, is not a problem, as BOTH uses of the word "her" are also in the possessive case. A possessive pronoun may refer to a possessive noun even though a subject or object pronoun may not..