I got a question regarding my homework. The task is to find the mistakes in a given text but the last sentence confuses me so much that I lost the overview. I'll copy the sentence below and hope that someone can help me.
"But to protect against children from labor abuse, U.S. law sets the minimum age for employment at 14 years of any age for most non-agricultural work and limits to 18 hours the number of hours that minors under the age of 16 may work for during a school week."
I think that it's "But to protect children from..." and "may work during..." but the rest is as I said pretty confusing. I'd be glad if you helped me.
Thanks a lot!
Other than the first place you've already corrected, the other things seem to be a lot of unneeded repetition. I'd do this:
To protect children from labor abuse, however, U.S. law sets the minimum age for employment at 14 for most non-agricultural work and limits minors under 16 to no more than 18 hours of work during a school week.
"however" removes the use of a conjunction at the beginning of the sentence.
The other things I corrected were simply wordiness and repetition.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/concise.htm
Sure! I can help you with that.
Let's break down the sentence and identify the mistakes:
Original Sentence: "But to protect against children from labor abuse, U.S. law sets the minimum age for employment at 14 years of any age for most non-agricultural work and limits to 18 hours the number of hours that minors under the age of 16 may work for during a school week."
Mistakes:
1. "against children" should be "children" (remove "against").
2. "of any age" should be removed.
3. "to 18 hours" should be "at 18 hours".
4. "the number of hours that minors under the age of 16 may work for during a school week" is structurally incorrect.
Corrected Sentence: "But to protect children from labor abuse, U.S. law sets the minimum age for employment at 14 years for most non-agricultural work and limits the number of hours minors under the age of 16 may work during a school week to 18 hours."
In order to identify the mistakes, it is important to carefully read the sentence and identify any grammatical errors, missing or extra words, or incorrect sentence structures. In this case, the mistakes involved removing unnecessary words and rephrasing the sentence more accurately.
I hope this clarifies the sentence for you! Let me know if you have any further questions.