Why is the antecedent considered to be "patients" in this phrase? "The antecedent in the following sentence is patients: Doctors should schedule more time for patients so they do not spend so much time in the waiting room."
This is correct. The word "they" will make best sense if its antecedent is "patients." (Doctors don't spend much time at all in waiting rooms, do they?!)
In order to understand why the antecedent is considered to be "patients" in the given phrase, we need to first understand what an antecedent is.
An antecedent is a word, phrase, or clause that a pronoun refers to or replaces in a sentence. In this context, the pronoun that we are looking at is "they," which is used in the sentence to refer to the patients.
To identify the antecedent, we need to locate the pronoun in the sentence and then find the noun or noun phrase that the pronoun is referring to. In this case, the pronoun "they" is referring to a group of people, and the noun phrase that represents this group is "patients."
So, in the given phrase, the antecedent (the noun phrase that the pronoun "they" refers to) is "patients," as it is the group of people who spend a lot of time in the waiting room.