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I was taking a test a few while ago when I encountered a question regarding conjunctions. What should be the correct sentence here?

"Though all players do not play hard, but when captain is motivated properly, they do a lot better"

A) Not all players play hard B) Though all players do play hard C) No improvement

I chose option B, but the answer was option A. I don't know how option A is the correct one.

Please help me with this question. Thank you.

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There are a couple of problems with B. The conjuction "but" is used to join two independent clauses together. In B the first clause starts with "though" which is a subordinating conjunction. There is nothing for it to be subordinate to.

If you removed "Though"

All players do play hard, but when the captain is motivated, they do a lot better.

Is a correct sentence.

However, it is also possible that the test writer thinks that "and" is better in this context. In fact both "but" and "and" could be used here, with a slight difference in meaning.

(A) is correct. (B) is not correct because of the word "Though".

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  • Thank you, James. I get you point here. So for example, in this sentence "Though he tried very hard, yet he failed in the exams" , "though"is a subordinating conjunction, i.e being subordinate to "he tried very hard". If we removed "though" from the sentence, we won't get the proper meaning of the sentence. Basically, "though" has to mean or make some sense for it to be used at the starting of any sentence without making it being superfluous. – SANTOSH KUMAR Jan 7 at 2:14
  • Your example actually has the same problem. The correct way to say it would be either "Though he tried very hard, he failed in the exams" or "He tried very hard, yet he failed in the exams". As noted by James K, in the original example you can remove either the "though" or the "but" to make option B correct: "though all players do play hard, when captain is motivated properly, they do a lot better" (no 'but') or "all players do play hard, but when captain is motivated properly, they do a lot better" (no 'though') – AlannaRose Jan 13 at 2:41
  • The problem is that since "though" is a subordinating conjunction, having the "but" involved adds too many conjunctions. You can read more on subordinating conjunctions here: grammarly.com/blog/subordinating-conjunctions . Note that the examples include only the subordinating conjunction, with no additional conjunctions like "but", "yet", or "and." – AlannaRose Jan 13 at 2:45

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