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Confusion in understanding statements

English Language & Usage Asked by abhudya singh on December 2, 2020

Petya and Vasya are competing with each other in a new interesting game as they always do.

At the beginning of the game Petya has to come up with an array of N positive integers. Sum of all elements in his array should be equal to S. Then Petya has to select an integer K such that 0 ≤ K ≤ S.

In order to win, Vasya has to find a non-empty subarray in Petya’s array such that the sum of all selected elements equals to either K or S−K. Otherwise Vasya loses.

This is a problem statement. Now, I am having trouble in understanding third paragraph. Who is In order to win statement referring to?

According to me it should be Vasya, beacuse the paragraph was changed so subject also changes from Petya to Vasya.

One Answer

I'm going to intuit based on the question that you're a native Russian speaker. It just so happens that this part of your sentence would flow identically in Russian. "Для того чтобы выеграть, Вася должен... " In both language cases it's clear that it's Vasya's victory that is dependent on coming up with the solution.

Also - I realize you didn't request help with this part of the sentence but I can't help it...

Petya and Vasya are competing with each other in a new interesting game as they always do.

This would flow much more naturally if you said

Engaged in an interesting new game, Petya and Vasya are competing again. The game consists of the following rules:

You don't need "with each other" because we can tell by the fact that there are two people and that they are competing (and so it goes without saying) that it's with each other. If there are other people involved whom you haven't mentioned yet, then it makes sense to include that as a clarification. But that's not the case here.

And "interesting" always comes before "new" just like "small" comes before "red". I don't recall the reason for this rule but it is also identical in Russian.

Answered by Yevgeny Simkin on December 2, 2020

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