It’s quite typical to have people with a poor command of English writing these test questions. Probably every other exam question, at best, has some sort of error. My favorite high school entrance exam question: “My grandpa has a circle yard” with the task being to find the image of grandpa and the “circle yard”. You wanna talk grammar, “circle” is modifying “yard”, which means it should be “circular”, so that’s wrong.
No need to ask under what condition someone would ever need to talk about “circle yards”. Yards are typically polygons of some form, as roads are typically straight and lot lines are also generally straight… “but being able to abstract the idea of a circle yard requires higher level thinking, which means if students can answer this, their English is really good, like better than yours, native English speaker”
Thailand had a lot of this. I’m not sure if they didn’t trust the foreigners with the test, or couldn’t stand the loss of face of admitting they weren’t good enough, or that whoever was in charge wanted the money to go a certain way, or what
What shocks me is that these same errors occur on every exam for English, beginning in first grade, and carrying on until high school and university exams come along where we as native speakers would have trouble getting through the whole thing.
Edit: it doesn’t shock me actually. I’ve lived here too long for that. But this is bilingual 2030 for you!
As a determiner, the word “whichever” refers to a specific number or item in a group.
“Whichever item is coated” would be more grammatical, but still not idiomatic. The idea is more like “whichever one you take is fine”. That is, some specific one and not any and all.
Speech here is full of this kind of ‘stream-of-consciousness non-sequitur’. Even webpages are like that. I wish they would teach kids to organise their thoughts/ideas more coherrently. However their comfort blankets beckon: vocabulary and grammar. Or maybe it is a siren’s call
Doesn’t give much confidence. English grammarians don’t rule industry.
Americans used to, which would be bad, and now Chinese do, which would be worse.
Anyway/whatever, I’d say the sentence needs an “is”, and would not be wrong if it had one. I wouldn’t personally use “whichever” in that way, but that isn’t what is being asked.
