This Kibbitzer complements Kibbitzer 19. The text is taken from a dissertation by a Chinese-speaking postgraduate student of education.

In the student's second sentence, the problem is that there is not a clear cross-reference to a noun in the first sentence, so it cannot be used. In this situation, the cross-reference needs to be carried out by means of this + a classifying noun: in this case result. The following short exercise gives you some practice in finding appropriate classifying nouns for this type of cross-reference:

1. Most Protestants now ordain women. They have come to this ____________ through careful theological and scriptual study which has convinced them that the arguments against are not only not convincing, but that full faithfulness to the gospel requires a gender-inclusive ministry.
2. In Greece anti-drug legislation has been made progressively tougher, removing the distinction between ''hard'' and ''soft'' drugs and between ''users'' and ''dealers''. But this ____________ is being increasingly questioned even by the police and new and radical solutions are being called for.
3. It is a common complaint of the nursery lobby that playgroup workers do not know enough about child development and are little more than glorified childminders. Christopher Ball leans towards this ____________ and his report stresses the need for 'quality' provision provided by trained staff led by graduates.
4. ''The United States wished things to turn out as they did,'' he writes in his memoirs, ''and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This ____________ was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.''
5. In some places in Wales and northern England the risk of premature death is 30 to 40 per cent greater than in the healthiest parts of the South. Smoke and industrial accidents in the towns and a harsher climate in the hills probably account for some of this ____________, but it is likely that in the urban north, at least, the biggest single factor is the lack of decent housing.
6. Magnetic responses from buried objects are affected by daily fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field, however. To get round this ____________ we used an instrument known as a gradiometer. This compensates automatically for the variation by recording the Earth's magnetic field with two sensors placed 50 centimetres vertically apart and subtracting them electronically.
7. We try to discover the path that the electron takes by setting up a complicated series of devices to determine whether it went by one particular route or not. If we do that, we discover that the electron will indeed simply go by one route or the other, its behaviour depending on whether we are observing it or not. This ____________ may appear strange and counterintuitive, but it has been routinely verified in numerous experiments carried out by researchers during the 1970's and 1980's.
8. After protracted negotiations, Croatia and rebel Serbs signed an internationally brokered truce which Western mediators hope will lead to the reintegration of Krajina into Croatia, and an eventual peace settlement in former Yugoslavia. ''We regard this ____________ as only the beginning of the road towards resolving this conflict and normalising Serbo-Croat relations,'' said Vitaly Churkin, Moscow's special envoy to the region, after the signing ceremony at the Russian embassy in Zagreb.

Nouns - agreement, approach, decision, discrepancy, problem, result, task, view

Key to exercise.