Question

In which of the following sentences are the pronoun and antecedent not in agreement?



Ever since they were little, the soccer players played the game.


A student should keep her password a secret.


They helped themselves to some mashed potatoes.


Your mother always tells you to wash your hands before dinner.

Answer 1

A student should keep her password a secret. Because we do not know a student is boy or girl.

Answer 2

Answer:

A student should keep her password a secret.

Explanation:

An antecedent is a word or group of words that a pronoun refers to, so in order to make a sentence clear, they should be in an agreement. In the sentence, "student" is the antecedent, and "her" is the pronoun that the antecedent refers to, however, such pronoun is not in agreement with the antecedent because "a student" does not indicate which genre it is referring to, but "her" indicates that it is a female. Therefore, in order to correct the error, we must replace the pronoun "her" with "their" or "her or his" which indicate that the student refers to both female and male.