Is “domestic” the best choice? “on … foreign, and military policies”

Question

I know this is a relatively easy question but I'm in disagreement with my teacher and his book, since non of them is written by a native, I decided to ask you guys to help me with this:

10. The National Security Council serves to advise the president on ........ foreign, and military policies related to national security.

A-domestic B-voluntary C-relative D-subjective

Also a quick side note, I don't know if this is a normal thing, but in this book everywhere that a comma was necessary, there is one. Like if after the blank a comma was necessary, it would either put a comma after the blank or put a comma at the end of each choice.

Now what the teacher said is that A is correct and translated the sentence to "... domestic policies, foreign policies and military policies...", and used the word as a noun.

What I said was that since there is no comma, if we put "domestic" there, it would act as an adjective and would be "... domestic foreign policies...", which is nonsense, so I thought C suits the best, we put it as an adjective to be translated to something like this "... relative foreign and military policies (meaning those policies that are enacted by the president and are relative to him, because some are enacted by the army or the ministry of foreign affairs itself)... "

My teacher doesn't agree, but can't seem to convince me, he doesn't explain anything, (and said that I'm discussing BS), so I wondered, first who is correct here? Second if he is correct, is there some sort of a rule making "domestic" just to be viable as a noun there, that I don't know of?

Thanks in advance, Aaron

Answer 1

Notice in your sentence the presence of the comma before the word and, called an "Oxford comma":

The National Security Council serves to advise the president on ........ foreign, (comma) and military policies related to national security.

The presence of this comma indicates that the list has at least three items. In the context of your sentence, this means that the NSC advises the president on:

1. _______ policies
2. foreign policies
3. military policies

The only word out of your four options that makes sense in this context is the word domestic, which is the answer your teacher provides.

You are correct, though, that putting the word domestic in that sentence would create the notion of two policies: domestic foreign policies and military policies. Therefore it seems most likely that your textbook forgot to add a comma after the blank space. If not, then your textbook incorrectly added a comma before the word and.

So your teacher is right that domestic is the right word to use, but you are also right that a comma should be placed after the blank so that the sentence makes sense. Otherwise, the comma that the textbook added after and is incorrectly added.