re: Please Check My Sentences? page 2
1: The rate which a material heats up at depends on its chemical composition.
2: The rate that a material heats up at depends on its chemical composition.
3: The rate a material heats up at depends on its chemical composition.
4: The rate at which a material heats up depends on its chemical composition.
Are they all correct sentences?
also, can we use “that” as subject for people in defining relative clauses? For eg.
A: Ram is a person that has five houses.
B: Ram is a person who has five houses.
can we use both “that” and “who” in sentence A and B since they are defining relative clauses giving essential information about “a person”?
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Comments (Page 2)
It depends what you want to say.
If you want to talk about Ram generally, mentioning something about him, he's a person who has five houses.
If you want to pick out Ram from a group of people who own different numbers of houses (maybe one owns two, another owns three, etc.), then he's the person who has five houses (the one person in that group of home owners). He is not the person who has three houses, and he's not the person who has six houses, and so on. Often when you use 'the' you are trying to exclude some possibilities.
This has nothing to do with relative clauses specifically. It's the same without those clauses. Adjectives and prepositional phrases can specify referents just as relative clauses sometimes do.
A telescope is an instrument for studying the stars. (General description to explain what a telescope is.)
But:
A telescope and a microscope are on display. Pointing to each:
The telescope is used to study the stars, not the microscope.
CJ
I am so clear on defining/non-defining relative clauses. In summary, if the reader/listener already knows which person or things is talked about, any information about the noun is a non-defining clause separated with a comma. I understand that the example with, “The car, which is red, has a 4-cylinder engine.”, is definitely not likely to occur in a real conversation. I just wanted to know if the sentence had a non-defining relative clause, which you confirmed it had given that the listener/reader know which car with the prior conversation. Thank you very much, CJ, for the help.
Hi, CJ. I came up with a tricky question.
My brother Ram who is a dentist lives in London.
Doesn’t the sentence imply I have more than one brother named Ram and there is a need to use a defining relative clause to tell the listener/reader which brother Ram? Thanks.