To attract the most talented workers, some companies are off

[MdAbuAsad]

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

[MdAbuAsad]

To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick those most important to them.

those refers back to what, actually? Is it the benefits or benefits only?
For both possibility the versions could be:
a) To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick benefits most important to them
^^ The green part is just a simple sentence itself-there is no connection to the previous sentence (To connect the .....of benefits). We can think of the green part as independent sentence which has sub, verb, object.

b) To attract the most talented workers, some companies are offering a wider range of benefits, letting employees pick the benefits most important to them
^^ The green part tell us that this part directly connected with the previous part (To connect the .....of benefits) because of the use of the.
So, it seems that version b makes sense. But, why do we use extra the in front of benefits here in this case? The word those directly should refer back to only benefits, shouldn't it?

[dmitryknowsbest]

Hi MdAbuAsad,

Can you cite the source? While we can't post full official questions, we can discuss portions of them if the problems are cited.

To your question, whether we think about "those" as referring to "benefits" or "the benefits" shouldn't make any difference in how we interpret the grammar of the sentence. It still functions the same way in the sentence. Generally, "those" refers to just the underlying noun (in this case, benefits), and if we were to replace it, we'd add an article as needed. This doesn't even depend on whether "the" was used the first time. For instance, consider these two cases:

The birds in my yard are bigger than those in yours.
My pizzas are more flavorful than those at most restaurants.

In the first case, if we wanted to replace the pronouns, we'd say "bigger than the birds in your yard."
In the second case, we'd say "the pizzas at most restaurants," even though "the" wasn't used in the first part.

Both THAT and THOSE are relative pronouns, and they refer to a basic noun (stripped of modifiers), allowing us to apply a new modifier. That's why we don't think, for instance, that in the pizza sentence, "those" is referring to MY pizzas AT restaurants. It's just referring to pizzas, and then we add the new modifier about restaurants. Using the word "the" just makes the sentence work correctly, but it isn't anything fundamental to the meaning. In fact, if we just said "than pizzas at most restaurants," the sentence would still be perfectly comprehensible.

Also, it's important to note that both of your green portions are modifiers only, not independent clauses. As soon as we see the main action followed by ", letting," we have a modifier. That doesn't change just because we have "employees pick (the) benefits."