[Grammar] WHERE or WHICH? in relative clause

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ssandra1

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Hello,
I'm a new volunteer ESL teacher and was looking through some of your exercises and I have a question on a sentence under the relative clause subject.
It was a multiple choice question and I thought the answer was:

Stratford is the town where Shakespeare was born in.

But when I checked the answer, it wasn't WHERE but WHICH. Can you tell me why that is so as soon as possible? I need to be able to explain it to my students as I'm quite sure some of them will think it's WHERE too.

Thank you.
 

English Freak

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Hi ssandra1,

Welcome to the website.
I'd like to refer you to the thread posted by kenny1999 yesterday at 23:44 (problems with "where" and "which').
You can say either this way:
Stratford is the town where Shakespeare was born.
or this way:
Stratford is the town which Shakespeare was born in.
If the relative clause is "which" you need to have a preposition (here, in) in your sentence either at the end of the sentence or right before "which".
Stratford is the town in which Shakespeare was born.
 

Raymott

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Further to the above post:
You can't write: "Stratford is the town in where Shakespeare was born", so you can't transform it into: "Stratford is the town where Shakespeare was born in."
You can write: "Stratford is the town where Shakespeare was born"
 

ssandra1

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Thank you so much for clarifying this!
 
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