Authority for this note: WWWebster Dictionary, the World Wide Web edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Used with permission.

Thank You

An alert user from Killeen, Texas, writes that the correct answer, the direct object, for the first sentence should be samples, and that "of their product" is a prepositional phrase modifying that word.

Authority: Atlantic Monthly Barbara Wallraff's "Word Court." November, 1998. p. 140.

Authority for this note: WWWebster Dictionary, the World Wide Web edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Used with permission.

In #2, the answer will depend on whether the concentration is exactly the same in A and B. If it's the same, then I think you want the singular. (This seems, at first, to be a contradiction to what we said about the apple and orange, but I think this situation is somewhat different: we're focusing on the singularity of the concentration, not the solutions.

In #3, strictly speaking, we've shifted pronoun reference. However, when giving directions this way, it is acceptable to shift from talking about how I or we do things to how you ought to do things. Usually the context allows for that shift. You don't want to jump back and forth, sentence to sentence, but some shifting is certainly acceptable. (No, the understood subject is still you; but it's OK.) If you were writing consistently about how we do things throughout an entire essay, you wouldn't want to wait until the last sentence, say, to bring in the understood you.