Writing: Pronoun-antecedent agreement — Harder example

- [Instructor] A crate of honey bees arrived at my house by accident, so I took them immediately to animal control. All right, so what is this pronoun, them, trying to refer to? As it might be tempting to say that it's referring to the honey bees, but the subject of this first part, this first clause of the sentence right over here, they didn't say honey bees arrived at my house, they say a crate of honey bees. So the subject here is actually singular, it's a crate, a crate. This right over here is singular. So when we use the pronoun, we also want the singular form. You could try it out by replacing it with the word that it's referring to. A crate of honey bees arrived at my house by accident, so I took the crate immediately to animal control. So instead of the crate, I wouldn't say them, I would say it. I would replace the plural pronoun with the singular, with the singular pronoun. So I took it immediately to animal control. This is a very, this is one that'll, will trip many people up many times because you see a singular thing that contains many things, and so you might say, okay, well there, I'm talking about a lot of honey bees, so I wanna use plural. Well, that would be the case if we just said, honey bees arrived at my house my accident, so I took them immediately to animal control. That would actually be okay. But we're not talking about honey bees arriving, we're talking about a crate, one crate of honey bees arriving. So the pronoun here is referring to that one crate, so it should be it.