Sentence Correction

After moving to Switzerland in the 1890’s, Albert Einstein attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, receiving in-depth training in quantitative analysis and developing a foundation for his future work in mathematical physics.
a.attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, receiving in-depth training in quantitative analysis and developing
b.attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, receiving in-depth training in quantitative analysis and developed
c.attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, received in-depth training in quantitative analysis, and he developed
d.attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, received in-depth training in quantitative analysis, developing


e.attending the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, receiving in-depth training in quantitative analysis, and developing




qa is a

And then what?

Not really sure what your specific issue is, but this question is all about parallelism.

For the second half of the sentence to be parallel, we need the verbs to be in the same form.

(a) receiving and developing
(b) receiving and developed
(c) received and he developed
(d) received, developing
(e) Albert Einstein attending

(b), (c) and (d) aren't parallel. The use of "attending" in (e) leaves the sentence without a main clause (which we always need).

Note that (d) could have been correct except that there's no connector between the first two clauses - if it had read "attended... and received..." it would also have been acceptable.

Choose (a).

I choose C because of tense

attending means it is continuing to present time which is not the case

pls shed some more light on this

I also picked D as I understood the Q wrong as he attended the Swiss Poly in the past, received training and that training helped AE in developing his skill set for future work

In hind sight it also makes sense that D is wrong because attended, received are not linked by "and". If they happened at the same time, they should have been linked by and and not a comma. Is that correct?

Stuart/Stacey

What is a good way to attack Q's that has one/two verbs and one/two gerunds? Is it the meaning that dictates the parallelism. Any other gotchas like usage of "and" & "comma" to weed out wrong answers

Thanks

Why B is wrong?

In B, we have "receiving" modify "attended..." and "developed"// "attended".

This is correct

if we say that we prefer original meaning, it is ok to choose A.

but B is grammatical

duongthang wrote:Why B is wrong?

In B, we have "receiving" modify "attended..." and "developed"// "attended".

This is correct

if we say that we prefer original meaning, it is ok to choose A.

but B is grammatical

We don't only prefer the original meaning; it's our job to preserve the author's intended meaning.

There are often choices that are gramatically correct but fail to preserve meaning, most commonly when we have to choose between and adjective and an adverb.

Here's the "to do list" for sentence correction:

1) eliminate grammatical errors;
2) eliminate choices that don't preserve the author's intended meaning; and then, if there's more than 1 choice left,
3) choose the stylistically superior answer.