The budget for education refelects the administration's

[RonPurewal]

if the administration had demanded both of those things, "but" would be nonsense -- they'd have to be connected with "and" instead.

"but" is in all 5 choices, so, the sentence MUST make sense with "but".
the only way that can work is if the budget does ONE thing that the administration wants (= gives control to the school districts), but imposes certain limitations that were NOT requested by the administration (= the rest of what's described).

[musunna]

Sorry to dig up the post...
My humble query is --- here 'demand' is used as noun, not verb (I suppose the verb is 'reflects'); is it still considered an example of subjunctive mood? don't we need demand/request/etc. as the main verb of the sentence?

It works the same way for both.

The manager demanded that workers be at the store by 9 p.m. Thanksgiving night.
The manager's demand that workers be at the store by 9 p.m. Thanksgiving night was unreasonable.
Both correct.
Same thing if "request", "order", etc. are used as nouns rather than verbs.

I searched economist.com for the use of "possessive + demand +that" and found the following sentences.
- The constitutional provision that laws can be thrown out by citizens' ballots is incompatible with the EU's demand that all would-be members implement all 80,000 pages of EU law.
- One notorious killing above all sticks in his mind: that of Miguel Angel Blanco, a young PP councillor, who was kidnapped in July 1997 and killed 48 hours later after the government had rejected ETA's demand that all ETA prisoners should be moved to jails in the Basque country.
- In October he turned down ETA's demand that his government should negotiate with some convicted killers.
- None is prepared to accede to the PA's demand that the organisation should cease all military (or terrorist) operations against Israel.

so it seems that 'demand' used as noun doesn't necessarily requires to act as 'subjunctive' in all cases. Would you please clarify the issue a bit more?

Thank in advance

[RonPurewal]

GMAC spends SEVERAL THOUSAND DOLLARS on the editing of EACH sentence correction problem.

if TheEconomist.com had spent several thousand dollars on meticulous editing of each and every sentence in its materials, then, yes, all of the sentences with "demand" + "should" would have been edited to eliminate the redundancy.

(:

[jabgt]

GMAC spends SEVERAL THOUSAND DOLLARS on the editing of EACH sentence correction problem.

if TheEconomist.com had spent several thousand dollars on meticulous editing of each and every sentence in its materials, then, yes, all of the sentences with "demand" + "should" would have been edited to eliminate the redundancy.

(:

Wow, what a waste, when I'm not able to truly admire the beauty or fully seize knowledges of sentences GMAC writes!

[RonPurewal]

the point is just that you can't expect the same degree of precision in other sources (periodicals, etc... and especially not blog articles).

[itsflicker]

I fully agree that the education budget reflects the level of education in general, I think that education is very important and we should appreciate it, and the state should allocate funding for the normal functioning of schools, colleges and universities.

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

I don't understand your post, itsflicker. Do you have a question?