Read the passage and answer the questions:
The annals of mountaineering history are adorned with figures whose daring transcended mere athleticism, embodying philosophical quests for transcendence against Earth's most formidable landscapes. Each mountaineer — whether treading the snows of Everest, the granite of Patagonia, or the arid heights of the Atlas Mountains — etched a distinct narrative of audacity and introspection.
“Tenzing Norgay” and “Sir Edmund Hillary’s” epochal 1953 Everest ascent immortalized human perseverance, but figures such as “Reinhold Messner” redefined the boundaries further. Rejecting supplemental oxygen, Messner’s minimalist ethos emphasized purity over conquest, portraying mountains not as trophies but as sentient entities commanding reverence. Similarly, “Junko Tabei”, the first woman to summit Everest, symbolized the intersection of resilience and quiet defiance in an era resistant to female adventurers.
The ethos of mountaineering diversified through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Climbers like “Kilian Jornet”, blending ultra-marathon endurance with technical ascents, and “Nirmal Purja”, whose record-breaking summits shattered temporal assumptions, reveal a contemporary paradigm: mountains as arenas of rapid, almost transcendental athleticism. Meanwhile, indigenous climbers, long relegated to footnotes in expedition histories, increasingly assert their rightful place as stewards of sacred peaks.
Thus, the saga of mountaineering resists reduction to mere feats of strength. It weaves a tapestry of cultures, philosophies, and personal odysseys — each ascent a dialectic between human fragility and the immutable majesty of the mountains.
In the sentence: "The annals of mountaineering history are adorned with figures whose daring transcended mere athleticism..."? What is the grammatical role of the clause "whose daring transcended mere athleticism"
- (a)Adjective clause modifying "figures"
- (b)Adverbial clause modifying "history"
- (c)Noun clause acting as the subject
- (d)Adjective phrase modifying "mountaineering"
Answer
Why
Correct — A. The clause opens with whose, a relative pronoun, and it comes straight after the noun figures. A relative pronoun tying a clause to the noun before it is the mark of an adjective clause.
It tells you which figures adorn the annals: those whose daring transcended mere athleticism. It is a full clause, with its own subject (daring) and finite verb (transcended).
A clause that describes a noun is an adjective clause, here modifying "figures" → option (a).
Why the others are wrong
- (b)Adverbial clause modifying "history" — History is the wrong anchor: the daring belongs to the figures, not to history. And an adverb clause answers when, why or how about a verb; it does not describe a noun.
- (c)Noun clause acting as the subject — Noun clause as subject fails the deletion test. Remove the clause and 'The annals of mountaineering history are adorned with figures' still stands, with The annals as its subject.
- (d)Adjective phrase modifying "mountaineering" — Adjective phrase is wrong twice. The words have a subject and a finite verb (daring transcended), so they form a clause, and they describe figures, not mountaineering.
Concept
A relative clause, also called an adjective clause, begins with a relative word such as who, whose, which or that, and describes a noun. Whose is the possessive one: 'figures whose daring' means figures and their daring.
To name a clause's role, ask what job it does. Describing a noun is an adjective's job. Saying when, why or how is an adverb's job. Standing as subject or object is a noun's job.
A deletion test helps. Remove a subject clause and the verb is left with no subject; remove a relative clause and the sentence still stands.
No comma separates figures from whose, so the clause is defining: it picks out the figures whose daring went beyond athleticism, rather than adding a side remark about all of them.
Key facts
- A relative (adjective) clause begins with a relative word such as who, whom, whose, which or that, and describes a noun.
- Whose is the possessive relative pronoun: 'figures whose daring' means figures and their daring.
- A clause contains its own subject and finite verb, here daring and transcended. A phrase lacks that pair.
- An adverb clause modifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb, answering questions such as when, why or how.
Study next
Common traps
- Calling it a phrase because it describes something, without checking that it has its own subject and verb
- Tying the clause to history or mountaineering, earlier in the sentence, when whose follows figures directly
Here a grammar question is set on the opening sentence of the reading passage.
Whose is itself the keyed blank at 10 Sep 2024, 16:00, English Q.25 ('Children, ___ basic, core learning ... was weak to begin with').
Which is keyed for a relative clause at 15 Sep 2025, 12:30, English Q.11 ('The discovery, ___ was unexpected, altered the trajectory of the entire study').
Related PYQs
No directly related past PYQ was found.