I got a question regarding my homework. The task is to find the mistakes in a given text but the last sentence confuses me so much that I lost the overview. I'll copy the sentence below and hope that someone can help me.

Question

"But to protect against children from labor abuse, U.S. law sets the minimum age for employment at 14 years of any age for most non-agricultural work and limits to 18 hours the number of hours that minors under the age of 16 may work for during a school week."

I think that it's "But to protect children from..." and "may work during..." but the rest is as I said pretty confusing. I'd be glad if you helped me.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Other than the first place you've already corrected, the other things seem to be a lot of unneeded repetition. I'd do this:

To protect children from labor abuse, however, U.S. law sets the minimum age for employment at 14 for most non-agricultural work and limits minors under 16 to no more than 18 hours of work during a school week.

"however" removes the use of a conjunction at the beginning of the sentence.

The other things I corrected were simply wordiness and repetition.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/concise.htm