Hi, ill try to go through them point by point.
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Originally posted by uss:
First, how correct is it to write 'To watch in amazement to march them into the mist?' I wrote 'To watch them march into the mist in amazement,' which she said was very wrong.
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Um.. well strictly speaking, neither of you are correct.
'To watch in amazement to march them into the mist?' - this one just isn’t good English
'To watch them march into the mist in amazement,' – this one is right, but the way you have formed the sentence imples that the people walking into the mist are amazed, not the person looking at them. If you get what I mean.
Perhaps better would be:
‘To watch in amazement as they march into the mist’.
Quote:
Originally posted by uss:
Expression nr. 29, I wrote 'To work on a memorial.' The correct one was 'To start work on the memorial.' I asked about that one, assuming both 'a' and 'the' should apply. She said "You see, if you start working on a memorial, you *know* what memorial you are working on."
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She is probably right here, because to say that you are going to work (and NOT about to start one) implies that there is one that you are working on, and so can be called ‘the’. The way you said it, it sounds like you are about to start afresh on a new memorial, or to pick one at random and just work on it.
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Originally posted by uss:
OK, then I asked about Nr. 25. I wrote 'To disappear into a wayside inn.' The correct way to write it was 'To disappear into the wayside inn.' She said "Well, usually there isn't more than one inn in a countryside." "But there CAN be more than one," I replied. "Don't start arguing." Grr!
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I would say you are 100% correct here and she is slightly incorrect J
To say what you said implies that you do not know the name of the inn and that is correct, because if you did know its name you would state it.
She is wrong because, as you say, there could be more than one. And without extensive knowledge of the area surrounding you, you would not know if there was an inn near or not. If you did have this knowledge, as I have said before, then you would probably name the inn by its proper name.
Quote:
Originally posted by uss:
Then I asked about Nr. 20. The sentence was 'To carve a giant sculpture into a mountain' and I wrote it correctly. I asked why that one was correct. She said "It's an exception." I asked how, to which she said "Understand, I took these expressions from the English book. Go ask an Englishman, if you really want to know!"
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Well yes, she is sorta right here… but then it depends on the situation you use these sentences in as are all the sentences you have here.
I would need to know the situation here to find a right answer but:
To say: 'To carve a giant sculpture into a mountain' probably would apply to you if you were no-where near mountains and were taking a vow to go to a mountainous area and carve something, or just to pick a mountain at random; like you have no prefence which one. Like what you are
doing is more important than the mountain you pick.
To say: 'To carve a giant sculpture into the mountain' implies that there is a specific mountain that you want to carve into, almost as if the mountain is more important thatn what you are doing to it, in this case sculpting.
Overall, and I think many other will agree, this test is not a very well formed one, and if they are just giving you sentences picked from a book without telling you the situation it is in, there can be many answers, and I feel you have a right to feel angry.
Drew