Unit 1bc Book

When completing the task on the principle of the Cospas-Sarsat system in Section 5 above, you might have noticed that the explanation was too general, not providing you with technical details. One way to add these details is to use relative clauses. Complete them in this task. While doing this task, you may find the illustration in Task 3 on p. 6 of your coursebook useful.

As you may have noticed in the previous task, using relative clauses is an elegant way to join two sentences together, for example:

Table adapted from: Bonamy, D. (2011). Technical English Level 3 Coursebook. Pearson Longman, p. 7.

If you study the table carefully, you will see the sentences can be broken into two parts: the main clauses (in italics) and the relative clause, which is a subordinate clause (in bold).  All the sentences have commas before their connectives (underlined and in bold). This is because the subordinate clauses are all non-defining relative clauses, which means that they just give some additional information which is not necessary for the meaning of the main clause. In other words, if you deleted the non-defining relative clauses, the meaning of the main clauses preceding them would remain the same. In addition to non-defining relative clauses, there are also defining relative clauses which are necessary to make the main clause logical and therefore cannot be omitted. For example:

The man who/that is operating the machine over there is my brother.

You can see the information given by the relative clause (in bold) is necessary because it defines the man. As this relative clause cannot be left out, there is no comma before the relative pronoun (who, that).

Maybe you now wonder why in this last example “that” is also mentioned to be a relative pronoun, while in the table above does not give it. During your previous English studies, you may have been taught that the relative pronoun who is used with people, which is used for things or animals and that for people, things and animals. The problem is that “that” can be used like this in defining relative clauses only because there is no comma in these relative clauses. There is never a comma before “that” (meaning: “který”, or “že”) and for this reason, you cannot use “that” in non-defining clauses simply because in these clauses the comma is necessary.

Finally, notice that who, which and that are not the only connectives you can use in relative clauses. Where, from where and whose can also introduce a relative clause, as the table above illustrates. Now, read this grammar overview, which gives basics of defining and non-defining relative clauses. Later in courses AEL5 and AEL6, you will learn about more complex types of relative clause.

Now that you know the basics of non-defining relative clauses, practise them in this task. Just join these pairs of sentences into complex sentences. Use WHICH, WHERE, FROM WHERE and WHO to replace the CAPITALIZED words. Finally, imagine you need to add extra technical facts and figures to the description of the emergency beacon. First, match items on the right to the correct items on the left in this task. After you finish, leave this task open to see the completed table. Then think about how you would read out the figures and the units in full. To check whether you can read them out correctly, complete the gaps in this task by writing out all the necessary figures and units. Sometimes you will need more than one word per gap. If you are not sure whether or not you can read out technical data in general, read this overview.