<p>My father saw how much Uncle Tom was enjoying his early retirement, and so he decided to do the same </p>
<p>Apparently the answer is (to do the same) because it is too ambiguous. It should refer to the retirement more directly?
is this too hard for the SAT</p>
<p>perhaps one does not know whether he wishes to enjoy his retirement as well or retire as well. when possible, try to limit ambiguity, although in such cases one may not even consider it ambiguous in normal speech. when I first read it, I simply assumed he(father… watch out for ambiguity:P) wished to retire. in reading the answer and pondering, I reached my current conclusion. </p>
<p>This was definitely one I would have gotten wrong because the mistake is so small and neglectible. nonetheless, we should train to avoid these mistakes, hopefully within our 50 second time frame(curse u collegboard)</p>
<p>Hmmm. I would say that the problem is not so much ambiguity, but a lack of parallel construction. It’s pretty clear that “do the same” refers to taking early retirement, but the phrasing is awkward. A better sentence might be something like, “My father saw how happy Uncle Tom was since he took early retirement, and so he decided to do the same.” I don’t think it’s any more or less ambiguous than the other sentence, but it’s better. Perhaps there are to many uses of “he” in there, though. OK, here we go, “After seeing how happy Uncle Tom was since he took early retirement, my father decided to do the same.” Even better, I think.</p>
<p>the problem is how we can attribute the error to “do the same”. by changing after seeing how happy uncle top was since he took early retirement, the error may very well be the first part of the sentence, rather than the second,</p>
<p>I was also thinking about parellel structure but as the explanation says ambiguity, I assume that the father may have or have not already retired. Think about it if dad were not retired. that would mean he would choose to retire, if he were retired, he would choose to be happy. </p>
<p>I would have preferred Uncle Tom retired early so my father decided to do the same, so he clearly decides to retire early as well… but unfortunately we need to work with the annoying SAT constructions. if only, if only</p>
<p>Some sample questions aren’t very good. This may be one of them.</p>
<p>^ Just a horrible question. </p>
<p>I realize that telling students to avoid wannabe tests is a broken record, but a decade of seeing the students making the same mistake over and over again is also getting old.</p>
<p>And the only worst part is that there a countless teachers who use the same awful material in their homework. Students might have to find the correct answer and then correctly predict where PR or Kaplan were wrong. </p>