ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by San Francisco.

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So it was delivered by a smiling streetcar driver along with a box of Rice a Roni.

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How would you correct this underlined segment from the passage, if at all?

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who believe?

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And here are the potential answers...

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It’s funny how one little word can throw an entire sentence askew.

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In this case, the word “who” is a real troublemaker.

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See, “who” is what’s known as a relative pronoun.

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Like normal pronouns, a relative pronoun’s job is to stand in for nouns in a sentence.

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However, relative pronouns have the addeduty of introducing relative clauses, which

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modify words, phrases, or ideas.

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So in the sentence in question the relative pronoun “who” signals a clause that describes

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the subject (aka “most people nowadays”).

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The trouble is that by establishing a relative clause the word “who” is stealing the

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verb from the subject of the sentence.

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Like full sentences, relative clauses need a subject and verb to exist.

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If “who” is allowed to have its way, the word “believe” would have to be its verb.

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Unfortunately, this derails everything because the original sentence is trying to use “believe”

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as its verb as well. By stealing the verb from the subject of the sentence,

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“who” makes the entire sentence incomplete.

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Looks like we’d better nix any option with “who” in it before this relative pronoun

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can case any more trouble. Choices (A) and (C) are out of the running.

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Now that we’ve got “who” out of our hair, we can turn our attention to choices (B) and (D).

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The difference here is that (B) uses the simple present tense with “believe,”

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and (D) uses the present progressive with “are believing.”

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Given the two, we’re going with choice (B).

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The simple present tense works better in this context because the writer is talking about

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a general belief that people have.

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The present progressive makes it sound like tons of people are obsessing about the issue

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of the origin of fortune cookies at this very moment.

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Which we hope isn’t true--for the good of the country as a whole.

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