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Question

Difficulty: MediumPronoun-Antecedent Agreement

The sentence below contains a blank where a pronoun is missing. What pronoun correctly completes the sentence to ensure proper pronoun-antecedent agreement?

Answer:While the engineers monitored the telemetry data, each of the spacecraft's main propulsion engines reached 【its】 maximum thrust capacity during the static fire test.

Answer

its
The correct answer is the singular possessive pronoun 'its'. The antecedent of the pronoun is the singular indefinite pronoun 'each'. The plural noun 'engines' in the intervening prepositional phrase does not change the grammatical number of the subject 'each', which requires a singular pronoun.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the pronoun's antecedent in the sentence.
The antecedent is the indefinite pronoun 'each'.
The pronoun refers back to the subject of the clause, which is 'each of the spacecraft's main propulsion engines'. In this structure, the singular indefinite pronoun 'each' acts as the true antecedent, while the prepositional phrase 'of the spacecraft's main propulsion engines' serves only to modify it.
2
Determine the number and gender/animacy of the antecedent.
The antecedent 'each' is singular and refers to inanimate objects (engines).
Indefinite pronouns like 'each', 'every', 'neither', and 'either' are grammatically singular, even when followed by a prepositional phrase containing a plural noun like 'engines'.
3
Select the possessive pronoun that matches the singular, inanimate antecedent.
The correct possessive pronoun is 'its'.
To maintain proper pronoun-antecedent agreement, a singular, third-person neuter possessive pronoun ('its') must be used.

Key Concept

Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement with Indefinite Pronouns
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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Topics

Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement

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