[Video] Q31: No change or it's or its or they're

Explanation for Question 31 From the Writing Section on the 2018 May Sat

Question number 31 says, 2 um, when exposed to speech that lacks their typical tones, 3 the human brain automatically reconstructs the missing frequencies. 4 So the key to this question is figuring out what there is referring to. 5 What subject are we talking about here? So possible subjects might be, 6 um, the tones, the human brain, 7 the missing frequencies. We want to figure out exactly what the subject is here. 8 The subject is going to be speech. 9 Um, the authors referring to speech that lacks typical lower tones. 10 It makes sense that tones is referring to speech. 11 Um, the human brain wouldn't necessarily have a tone. 12 Um, so speech is really the subject here. 13 Speech is lacking. It's typical, lower tones. 14 So therefore the human brain reconstructs the missing ones. 15 So since speech is our subject, we're looking for a singular subject. 16 Um, and we want to make sure that we're choosing a singular pronoun in 17 order to get that across. 18 So there, here is plural. 19 So we're going to eliminate the no change option there. 20 Um, B when we see this apostrophe here, 21 it means it is rather than, 22 um, it's as in the pronoun. So we're going to eliminate choice B as 23 well, C as our correct answer. This is the singular, 24 um, D is almost like the form of there that we already see 25 in the passage. Um, but it's actually the incorrect form of there. 26 This there with the apostrophe means they are, 27 which definitely doesn't make sense if you read it back in the context of 28 the sentence. So we're going to eliminate choice D as well. 29 We want to go with the singular pronoun. That's going to be it's because 30 our subject is speech. So for question number 31, 31 we choose answer choice C.