English Grammar - Spotting Errors

English Grammar
English Grammar - Spotting Errors

Find the part of the sentence that contains an error.


What renders the draft legislation particularly contentious is not its proposed realignment of fiscal powers per se, (1)/ but that it presumes, without empirical substantiation, (2)/ a fiscal equivalence among states whose developmental baselines are (3)/ incommensurable by any normative metric. (4)

Options:

  1. (1)
  2. (2)
  3. (3)
  4. (4)

Right Answer: (2)

This sentence uses the correlative structure 'not ... but ...', which demands that the elements joined on either side be grammatically parallel. Part one places a noun phrase after 'not', namely 'its proposed realignment of fiscal powers'. Parallelism therefore requires another noun phrase after 'but', yet part two supplies a clause introduced by 'that it presumes'. This mismatch breaks the parallel structure and is the grammatical error. The construction could be corrected by writing 'but its presumption of'. Parts three and four are correctly framed. Hence the error lies in part (2).

This question is part of English Grammar - Spotting Errors, which has 15 practice questions with answers.

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