Question : Correct the following sentence.
The standard person’s conception of systematic method is necessarily faulty in so far as it assumes that hypothesis develops by design from comments of usual events; which are fundamentally unchanged by the preconceptions of the observers.
Option 1: No Change
Option 2: events, which are
Option 3: events, themselves
Option 4: events, these are being changed
Option 5: none of the above
Correct Answer: events, which are
Solution :
Notice how this simplified version makes the grammatical error more obvious. The last part of the sentence, following the semicolon, is a dependent clause, because it starts with the pronoun “which.” This makes it wrong to use the semicolon. Only an independent clause - a clause that can stand alone as a sentence - may follow a semicolon. Read what follows the semicolon in this case, and you can probably “hear” that it cannot stand alone as a sentence.
To correct it, the connection between the final clause and the rest of the sentence needs to be repaired.
