Job Discussion Forums

[SeasonedVet]

Here are the two sentences from the passage to provide you with context if you need it:
He remarked that he wished he could hire some people(62) to eat different kinds of food and chemicals and then allow the contents of their stomachs to be examined.

After class two students went up to him and offered(63) to eat the special meals.

The instructions (as far as the teacher could explain to me) is to choose the sentence in which the word/verb is "doing the same work" as the underlined one in the example.

(62) to eat
a) I want to buy the same dictionary as you have
b) John went to London to see the lights.
c) John didn't have money to buy the furniture for his new room.
d) Mary was pleased to hear the news.

(63) to eat
a) Mary had no friends to talk about the matter with.
b) Many Japanese like to have nori for breakfast.
c) This bridge is not strong enough for the Lorry to cross.
d) How careless he is to have lost his umbrella.

I remember (64) hearing about a a student who worked his way through college selling christmas trees.
a) I had my cat feeding on canned food.
b) I can't get along well with people working at the same office.
c) I can see the birds hopping on the tree.
d) Walking along the streets in the morning is good to your health.

[Kootvela]

The instructions are too puzzling, I'm afraid,

[Yawarakaijin]

Agreed. I think what the lesson is trying to get at is the different feelings the use of the infinitive can create but it is not very clear.

Is it the use of the infitive to express purpose or intent versus mere order of occurence?

I went to see him. Expressing why you went somewhere

I want to go. Not expressing why you "want" but showing simple logical order.

....?

[Glenski]

They want you to choose phrases that use words which have the same part of speech as the underlined ones. Weird directions anyway.

62. "to eat" is used to modify "people".
So, in that sense, c is the only correct answer.


63. "to eat" is used as an object of the verb "offered"
So, the correct answer is b, which also uses the infinitive phrase as an object of a verb.

64. "hearing" is the object of the verb "remember". That makes it a noun.
So, d is the only correct answer to me because it is the subject of the sentence. The others are adjectives modifying the nouns preceding them.

Who the heck is this test for?

[Kootvela]

*runs away screaming*

[Mapleblondie]

Kootvela, haha...I had the same impression. I have a pretty decent grasp of English grammar, but that just flew right over my head. LOL. I'll join in on the screaming and running now!...Hehe.

[Kootvela]

*hides in bushes and shivers*

[markle]

AAAAAAARRRRRGHH

Now you know why Japanese kids hate English

Seriously the Education Authorities fill their heads up with this inane grammatical crap so much that they have no space to actually apply it in a real life setting.

This is why I avoid teaching high school kids. Elementary kids haven't been damaged and Oldies have forgotten it all.

[Glenski]

Yes, this would be very similar to what you might find on an entrance exam, but the fact is, since it is there, we teachers still need to know how to explain it. Even if one doesn't know the answer immediately, one needs to have enough reference material to check on it and soon afterward get the information to the student.

I do.

[fluffyhamster]

What makes the task difficult is trying to match structures unaligned and at a greater spatial distance than need be (it would've helped if the examples that the OP posted were consistently laid out for a start! See end of this post). To borrow a useful tool from Corpus Linguistics, make concordance lines (KWICs) and put the word(s) in question centrally as the node, then neatly write out the rest of the words that come before and after the node to a span of say three words in each direction (although in the example below, only the words before the node are really needed). This is all similar perhaps to a substitution table, albeit a more contrastive one than usual.

(After class two students went up to...)
him........and....offered..../..to....eat.../.....the....special...meals
had.........no.....friends..../..to....talk.../...about....the......matter
Many........J........like......./..to...have../....nori......for....breakfast
for..........the.....lorry....../..to...cross../ ----------------------------
careless...he........is......../...to...have../....lost......his....umbrella

From this, it is obvious 1) that we are dealing with a verb phrase (the two nouns, 'friends' and 'lorry', can be immediately disregarded) and 2) what sort of verb phrase it is ('How careless he is to have...' is obviously not it).

Or instead of all the above I could've just said "Look at the word before 'to' in the master sentence and find the matching POS", but perhaps this would become obvious and second nature to some only by having the simpler and clearer discovery procedure/back-up/check already established and available if need be.

In Japan, the plain (not grid-like or with boxes) paper with vertical wide-feint lines (for writing in traditional Japanese style, downwards from the top right corner), available from e.g. Can-Do 100-yen shops, is perfect for making KWICs: simply rotate the pad through 90 degrees then rule two lines about 5cm apart down through the centre of the page to form the node boxes column (picture the slashes in the examples above all being in line and part of the same two lines!). Western-style lined paper is a bit too narrow for making longer KWIC lines, and the plain too plain (i.e. completely unlined)! (Maybe I am into the aesthetics of things too much!).


He remarked that he wished he could hire some people (62) to eat different kinds of food and chemicals and then allow the contents of their stomachs to be examined.
a) I want to buy the same dictionary as you have
b) John went to London to see the lights.
c) John didn't have money to buy the furniture for his new room.
d) Mary was pleased to hear the news.

After class two students went up to him and offered (63) to eat the special meals.
a) Mary had no friends to talk about the matter with.
b) Many Japanese like to have nori for breakfast.
c) This bridge is not strong enough for the Lorry to cross.
d) How careless he is to have lost his umbrella.

I remember (64) hearing about a student who worked his way through college selling christmas trees.
a) I had my cat feeding on canned food.
b) I can't get along well with people working at the same office.
c) I can see the birds hopping on the tree.
d) Walking along the streets in the morning is good to your health.

[Glenski]

fluffy,
It is not a verb phrase. Verb phrases have verbs plus auxiliary verbs (can, could, will, etc.).

This is an infinitive phrase.

YOUR explanation makes ME run away in fear!

[Yawarakaijin]

Ahhh metalanguage. The cause of, and solution to, all of lifes little problems.

[SeasonedVet]

Hey everyone. Thanks for replying.
Glenski's answers matched the J-teacher's answers perfectly.
Glenski seemed to do that pretty quickly. That is not an easy task.
I tried it myself and found that I arrived at the same answes as Glenski and as the J-Teacher with the exception of 64.
I have however changed my answer after looking at it again.

I will now write the explanation that the J-Teacher gave me as to how Japanese people answer questions like this one.

He remarked that he wished he could hire some people(62) to eat different kinds of food and chemicals and then allow the contents of their stomachs to be examined.
To eat in 62 is taberu tame たべる　ため の　ひと　びと
a) I want to buy the same dictionary as you have =かう　こと
b) John went to London to see the lights. =みる　ため　に
c) John didn't have money to buy the furniture for his new room. =かう　ため　の　おかね
d) Mary was pleased to hear the news.= きいて
Therefore (62) たべる　ため　and (c) かう　ため　の　おかね　match.

After class two students went up to him and offered(63) to eat the special meals.
To eat here is taberu you ni たべる　よう　に　
a) Mary had no friends to talk about the matter with.= はなす　ため　の　ともだち
b) Many Japanese like to have nori for breakfast. =たべる　こと
c) This bridge is not strong enough for the Lorry to cross.= わたる　の　に
d) How careless he is to have lost his umbrella.=なくして　
Therefore (63) たべる　よう　に　and (b) たべる　こと are a match.

The answers are exactly the same as Glenski's with the grammatical explanations. the way the J-Teacher arrived at the answers is different but is connected to the way Glenski arrived at his.
What do you guys think?

[SeasonedVet]

Oh forgot to add that the test is a hospital entrance exam.

And I must say that our grammar tests usually don't focus on things like this. I did a course at Uni long ago called "Grammar and Meaning" which looked at stuff like this. it involved looking at mood and feelings generated by certain word or verb choices as well as the semantics involved, but it definitely is not something that we would be subjected to at High School.
This is stuff that grammarians look at.

It is also noteworthy that even though they look at English Grammar in such a less than practical way( the descriptive "metalanguage that Yawarakaijin mentioned") that doesn't equip them for everyday practical English use, I guess that they study Japanese Language grammar quite differently as they need it for practical use in their lives.

[Glenski]

If you're a Japanese teacher and can explain it in Japanese (taberu tame), all the better.

Most foreign teachers don't have that luxury or permission, and we usually don't have that duty.

What did the teacher think of MY ENGLISH explanations?