Quote:
Originally Posted by opie226  One of my colleagues came to me with this question which appears on a college entrance exam for Japanese high school students;
The tree rings can also reflect a year ( ) which there were insect plagues.
The possible answers to the blank are: at in of on
I quickly removed 'at' and 'of' as choices, but I ran into difficulties in deciding between 'in' and 'on'.
At first I thought 'in' was the correct choice, but after looking at the perculiar use of '...a year...' and '...were...plagues' I was thinking 'on' would be the correct choice due to the subjunctive voice of the sentence.
Any thoughts on the answer would be appreciated!!  |
This is basically an adjectival clauses, which means you can divide the sentence into two separate shorter sentences. Here is my division:
The tree rings can reflect a year.
There were insect plagues in a year.
You canNOT say:
There were insect plagues on a year, or
There were insect plagues at a year, or
There were insect plagues of a year.
So "in" is the only choice.