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Grammatically, what's wrong with these two sentences?
1) During our tour of the refinery, it was seen that both propane and gasoline were produced in large volumes. 2) A professor of economy and history at our university developed a new theory of the relationship between historical events and financial crises.
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it was seen > we saw were being produced
second one seems grammatically sound but pretty clunky.
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1) I think the question's creator intends "it was seen" to be the error. However, "it" in this context is a syntactic expletive, i.e. it serves as a dummy pronoun. Of course, a dummy pronoun is pointless when one could just refer to the predefined subject in the clause before, but it's a matter of poor style not bad grammar.
I think it's quite a terrible question
2) Economy refers to system, while economics refers to the field of academia. The right word should be economics.
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1) "it was seen" by whom? Use "we saw." (passive voice) 2) "economy" should be "economics," and "of the relationship" should be "about the relationship." (incorrect preposition)
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In the second sentence, besides "economy->economics" maybe also "a new theory about/concerning the relationship" or "a new theory relating ___ to ___". This might just be personal style but I don't like the "of" in that sentence as it stands. Only way to write it with the "of" that I see is "a new theory of the historical events-financial crises relationship" but that's pretty awful.
I really can't put my finger exactly on why I think it's wrong, though, just sounds kinda off. (Generally a bad way to evaluate grammar, I know )
edit: Sero puts it more authoritatively, listen to him
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On April 12 2014 16:02 Garnet wrote: Grammatically, what's wrong with these two sentences?
1) During our tour of the refinery, it was seen that both propane and gasoline were produced in large volumes.
should be vespene gas
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You must place that on a vespene geyser.
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Netherlands6175 Posts
Or you could say 'An economics and history professor from XXX University has developed a new theory describing the relationship between historical events and financial crises.'
Edit: Is this homework we are helping you with?
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Not a native speaker.
+ Show Spoiler +The first one seems correct but mixing active and passive voice makes it sound a little strange.
For the second one I think his theory was on (i.e about) the relationship between historical events and financial crises. A theory of something is more of a complete description a phenomenon and in any case the part after of should be shorter, not a long winded description.
When I read theory of something I treat it as a single unit, so I'd like it to be concise.
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Also, in 1st sentence, I think last "were" should be a "being" to show it was happening at the same time you were there. (Also I'm wondering if volume should be singular but I'm not sure if that's really wrong.)
1) During our tour of the refinery, we saw both propane and gasoline being produced in large volumes.
Second one the only problem I see is economy should be economics.
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2) A professor of economy and history at our university developed a new theory of the relationship between historical events and financial crises.
A professor of economics and history at our university recently developed a new theory describing the unique relationship between the state of the economy and major historical events.
I think it comes off less awkward with a bit of switching about and some adjectives.
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United States24342 Posts
Although this is the blogs section, this thread is basically "help me answer this question" which is a type of thread we don't allow on TL. All threads should, at least to an extent, be contributory.
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