この学校ではバイクで通学することを。。。。。

Question

この学校ではバイクで通学することを

1. 十年も前から校則で禁止している。
2. 生徒会で話し合った結果、禁止された。

For the above statement the correct answer is 1, but i chose 2, why is 2 incorrect?

Meaning:

1. Riding a bike to this school was prohibited 10 years ago via the school regulations.
2. Riding a bike to this school by talking to the student council, whose outcome was to prohibit it.

Answer 1

I would say there are two clues to determine the correct answer:

• the presence of the particle を marking the direct object of a verb, and
• the use of an active verb in one sentence and a passive verb in another.

I suppose one might be able to construe the passive as a suffering passive. But, the key matter here is that there is no further context.

Put a bit more directly,

この学校ではバイクで通学することを十年も前から校則で禁止している。

makes perfectly good sense in the complete absence of further contextual information.

この学校ではバイクで通学することを生徒会で話し合った結果、禁止された。

just doesn't sound quite right. There's a grammatical conflict between ことを and 禁止された.

As I mentioned before, you might construe this as an example of suffering passive. But that requires a bit of mental gymnastics in my opinion. The first problem is that there is no context provided in which such an interpretation makes sense. But more so, secondly if you were to make this out as the suffering passive, then somehow you would have to construe this decision by the student assembly as somehow directed against the speaker. Perhaps that sort of situation could arise in an anime, but I'd think in real life it's unlikely (and probably would make the speaker seem a bit narcissistic).

At any rate, in these sorts of problems, you should choose an answer that makes the best possible answer in a context neutral situation. You should think about the grammar and how it is laid out and interpreted in a context without the addition of any further baggage.