The budget for education

[gmatter_2008]

130. The budget for education reflects the administration's demand that the money is controlled by local school districts, but it can only be spent on teachers, not on books, computers, or other materials or activities.
A. the money is controlled by local school districts, but it can only be spent
B. the money be controlled by local school districts, but it allows them to spend the money only
C. the money is to be controlled by local school districts, but allowing it only to be spent
D. local school districts are in control of the money, but it allows them to spend the money only
E. local school districts are to be in control of the money, but it can only spend it

Hi Tutors

Please check this question.This is question from the GMAT prep...
The answer is B.But isnt the Pronoun "it" not having an antecedent in the statement.It cant refer to administration's demand.(possesive)

Am I missing something here.Please reply

[RonPurewal]

the antecedent must be 'the budget'. the best reason i can give as justification is the following: the official people say that that's the correct answer, so we have to stick with what they tell us.

here are some thoughts:
'the money' is ruled out as an antecedent, because 'the money' appears again later in the same clause. in other words, because the word 'money' appears a couple of words later - 'it allows them to spend the money...' - it's infeasible that 'it' could also stand for the money.
'administration's' can't be a referent because it's in the possessive case (this is an occurrence of the little-known and little-used 'possessive poison' rule).

i can see how you might still perceive an ambiguity, say, between 'budget' and 'demand'. but notice the following:
* first, EVERY viable answer choice features the same degree of ambiguity in the pronoun 'it'. so, if you're going to call that answer choice ambiguous, then you have to say the same for all the other answer choices as well.
* because you have the same ambiguity everywhere, you have to look for grammatical parallelism between pronoun and antecedent. in this case, 'it' is the SUBJECT of its clause, and 'budget' is the SUBJECT of its clause, creating perfect parallelism.

oh yeah

[guest]

Ron,

Can you explain why ans A is incorrect?

[RonPurewal]

Ron,

Can you explain why ans A is incorrect?

* "is" should be "be".
since the sentence is describing a demand, it must use what's called the command subjunctive, which takes the same form as the infinitive (minus the initial "to").
this construction is used when requests, demands, stipulations, etc. are preceded by "that".

* the pronoun "it" is at best ambiguous, and at worst incorrectly predicated.
it could be viewed as ambiguous, because it could potentially refer either to "budget" or to "money" (or even to "demand"). alternatively, if you're going to be generous and assign a 'preferred' antecedent, then, unfortunately, the grammatically parallel antecedent is the wrong word: "it" is the SUBJECT of its clause, so we refer to the SUBJECT of the preceding clause, which is "the budget" (oops, wrong word).
notice that (b), the correct choice, has "it" as the subject of its clause and the CORRECT antecedent ("the budget") as the subject of the other clause.

this is generally the way these things work, by the way: first go for an entirely unambiguous pronoun, but, if that's unavailable, then go for the pronoun that's grammatically parallel to the intended antecedent.