paco2004  +  224688 Thu, 11 May 06 11:38 PM Hello guys I'm still stuck to reading Washington Post's article "A Passage to Harvard", a story about a Harvard girl student who committed plagiarism in writing her teen-literature. This question is originally given to me by a Japanese learner of English, who is trying to read the article. The question is about how we should read the article's last sentence: And Viswanathan, perhaps, has learned a lesson that the admissions industrial complex does its best to obscure: There are more things to cry about than not getting into Harvard. What troubles us here is how to grammatically parse the phrase after the colon: "There are more things to cry about than getting into Harvard".  Is the phrase working as the object of the verb "obscure"? Or is it a phrase put appositively to "a lesson" (the object of "has learned) ? paco paco2004 Joined on Wed, Nov 17 2004 Senior Member 4,095 In Japan today even dogs are learning how to bow-wow in English. Articles, Verbs, Colons, Literature

	MrPedantic  +  224691 Thu, 11 May 06 11:43 PM Hello Paco I would take it as a description of the "lesson": "there are more [important] things to cry about [in this world] than not getting into Harvard". MrP MrPedantic Joined on Tue, Oct 12 2004 Veteran Member 12,592 ...opella forensis / adducit febris...