Breakdown of Ellos perdieron la cosecha por el fertilizante malo.
ellos
they
perder
to lose
por
for / by / through / in/during (part of the day)
la cosecha
harvest
malo
bad
el fertilizante
fertilizer (chemical)
Questions & Answers about Ellos perdieron la cosecha por el fertilizante malo.
This lesson is about por más que and por mucho que. Why is there only a simple por here?
While your current lesson focuses on using por in scalar concessive clauses (meaning "no matter how much" or "even though"), in this sentence, por is simply acting as a preposition of cause. Here, it means "because of" or "due to." A concessive version fitting this lesson's theme would be something like: Perdieron la cosecha por más que usaron fertilizante (They lost the harvest no matter how much fertilizer they used).
Why do we use por instead of para for "because of"?
As a quick refresher, por is used to express the cause or reason behind an action (looking backward at why it happened). If you used para, it would express purpose or destination (looking forward), which would bizarrely imply they intentionally lost the harvest in order to give it to the bad fertilizer!
Could I place the adjective before the noun and say por el mal fertilizante?
Yes, you can! Remember that when malo is placed immediately before a masculine singular noun, it drops the final -o and becomes mal. Using el mal fertilizante sounds a bit more subjective or literary, while el fertilizante malo (after the noun) sounds like a straightforward, objective categorization of a defective product.
Does cosecha refer to the event of harvesting, or the actual crops?
It frequently means both! Depending entirely on the context, cosecha can translate to "harvest" (the time or act of gathering) or "crop" / "yield" (the actual physical produce). In this sentence, losing the cosecha implies the physical plants or produce were ruined.
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