The referent of IT

[YingyingL808]

[redacted]

[Chelsey Cooley]

Interesting question!

First of all, let me just give you a warning about paying too much attention to 'ambiguous pronouns'. If it's obvious to you what the antecedent is, here's the only situation where you should worry about an isolated pronoun that 'might be ambiguous'. You're down to two answer choices. You absolutely can't find anything else wrong with either of them, but one has a pronoun that, grammatically, could have multiple different antecedents, while the other doesn't (for instance, if it replaces the pronoun with a noun). In that case, choose the less ambiguous option.

Now, here's the deal with your two example sentences. In (1), there isn't anything illogical about saying that the eye notices the wavelength, per se. You could argue that technically, the eye notices radiation itself, rather than the wavelength of the radiation. You might even be right - I actually don't know. The problem is, though, that you could only decide whether you were technically right or not by using outside knowledge about biology, physics, etc. The GMAT will never make you think that hard and will never play that kind of trick on you. If they're going to make a sentence illogical, the logical problem has to be obvious to anybody (although the grammar might do a really good job of hiding it!).

In (2), the supposed ambiguity comes from the fact that you have a singular pronoun, and you have two singular nouns that are both pretty close to it, and so according to grammar, 'it' could refer to either of them. It might help you to think about it as a problem with grammatical ambiguity instead of logical ambiguity. That said, if this was an answer choice in an actual SC problem, and every other answer choice had an obvious grammar error, I wouldn't hesitate to pick it.

[YingyingL808]

Thank you very much Chelsey! I was quite confused about the logic of the sentence, but now I start to understand what the GMAT focuses on.

Interesting question!

First of all, let me just give you a warning about paying too much attention to 'ambiguous pronouns'. If it's obvious to you what the antecedent is, here's the only situation where you should worry about an isolated pronoun that 'might be ambiguous'. You're down to two answer choices. You absolutely can't find anything else wrong with either of them, but one has a pronoun that, grammatically, could have multiple different antecedents, while the other doesn't (for instance, if it replaces the pronoun with a noun). In that case, choose the less ambiguous option.

Now, here's the deal with your two example sentences. In (1), there isn't anything illogical about saying that the eye notices the wavelength, per se. You could argue that technically, the eye notices radiation itself, rather than the wavelength of the radiation. You might even be right - I actually don't know. The problem is, though, that you could only decide whether you were technically right or not by using outside knowledge about biology, physics, etc. The GMAT will never make you think that hard and will never play that kind of trick on you. If they're going to make a sentence illogical, the logical problem has to be obvious to anybody (although the grammar might do a really good job of hiding it!).

In (2), the supposed ambiguity comes from the fact that you have a singular pronoun, and you have two singular nouns that are both pretty close to it, and so according to grammar, 'it' could refer to either of them. It might help you to think about it as a problem with grammatical ambiguity instead of logical ambiguity. That said, if this was an answer choice in an actual SC problem, and every other answer choice had an obvious grammar error, I wouldn't hesitate to pick it.

[RonPurewal]

OG is a banned source here.

this extends not only to the text of the problems, but also to discussion of the problems. (it does not mean "let's just ask about OG problems without quoting them", as that would render the whole prohibition meaningless.)

thank you.