A recent and popular self-help book wryly notes that if adolescence was not so painful, it would have a droll comedic aspect, at least in retrospect.

A) was not so painful, it
B) was not so painful, they
C) were not so painful, they
D) were not so painful, it
E) were not so painful, being one

I narrowed this down to (D) and (E), knowing that the subjunctive mood calls for "were." In deciding between the two, I ended up incorrectly choosing (E) because I felt that the "it" pronoun does not have a clear referent. I thought the "it" could refer to the book -or- adolescence.

Can someone help explain why this is not a pronoun error?

Thanks in advance for your help/feedback.

When matching a pronoun with its antecedent, you can rely on the sentence structure as a secondary tool.

Let's look at the correct answer for your example:
A recent and popular self-help book wryly notes that if adolescence were not so painful, it would have a droll comedic aspect, at least in retrospect.

Simplify by taking out modifiers:
A ... book ... notes that if adolescence were not so painful, it would have a quality, at least in retrospect.

More simply:
A book notes that IF X were Y, (THEN) it would have Z.

For meaning/intent, you can rely on the parallelism between IF/THEN clauses. Since "adolescence" is the subject in the IF clause, and "it" is the subject in the THEN clause, then "it" must be "adolescence." The default assumption is that the two subjects are the same, unless clearly specified otherwise.

If we actually did mean that "the book would have a droll comedic aspect," we would actually have to use the proper noun to make clear that the subject of the THEN clause is intended to be different from the subject of the IF clause.

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Emily Sledge
Instructor
ManhattanGMAT

Ahhhh OK got it. Essentially there is an "If... then" clause in the sentence and the implied subject of an if then clause is the subject introduced in the "If" portion.

Very helpful, thank you.

: )

What is the OA?

What is the difference between A and D?

Regards

You need subjunctive mood here. Hence D (this should be OA as well).

Yes, (D) is the correct answer.

ahistegt is right about the was/were difference between (A) and (D). It may also help to think about WHY the subjunctive mood is necessary and why it requires a different verb form.

We use the simple past "was" to indicate things that actually happened in the past. However, the intended meaning of this sentence is not that "adolescence was not so painful." On the contrary--we want to imply that adolescence IS painful, but to talk hypothetically about how things might be if it were otherwise. We use the subjunctive verb "were" to differentiate between real and hypothetical. "If" is the indicator that this sentence is hypothetical.

_________________
Emily Sledge
Instructor
ManhattanGMAT

What I did not see in this question is how this sentence has Subjunctive verb. Is "Notes" an indication that this is sentence with Subjunctive verb.

Please help.