GPrep - With surface temperatures estimated at minus 130

[carnation]

With surface temperatures estimated at minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit, Jupiter's moon Europa has long been considered far too cold to support life, and with 60 square miles of water thought to be frozen from top to bottom.

A. Europa has long been considered far too cold to support life, and with
B. Europa has long been considered far too cold to support life, its
C. Europa has long been considered as far too cold to support life and has
D. Europa, long considered as far too cold to support life, and its
E. Europa, long considered to be far too cold to support life, and to have

OA: B

Can anyone please explain the process of elimination. Thanks!

[ErikaPrepScholar]

This question is tricky because it relies heavily on having an idiom memorized rather than applying grammatical concepts - if you don't know the idiom, it's going to be much harder to get the question right. The GMAT has a few classic idioms that are bound to show up on any test. "Consider X, Y" is one of them. "Consider as" and "consider to be" are both used colloquially, but neither is grammatically correct. This allows us to eliminate C, D, and E right off the bat, leaving us with A and B.

We're dealing with a pretty complex sentence here, so we should look for ways to simplify it. Right away, we see that "With surface ... Fahrenheit" is a descriptive phrase set off by a comma, so it shouldn't be necessary to the grammar of the sentence. Let's go ahead and eliminate it from our sentence to simplify things:

• Jupiter's moon Europa has long been considered far too cold to support life, and with 60 square miles of water thought to be frozen from top to bottom.

Looking at A, we see that the sentence is divided into two clauses ("Jupiter's ... life" and "with ... bottom") separated by a comma + a conjunction ("and"). Whenever we have two clauses connected by a comma + a conjunction, both clauses need to be independent - they need to be able to stand on their own as sentences. For example,

• Rosalind put on boots and wrapped a scarf around her neck.

is fine, but

• Rosalind put on boots, and wrapped a scarf around her neck.

is not - "wrapped a scarf around her neck" doesn't work as it's own sentence. We would need to add a subject:
[blockquote]Rosalind put on boots, and she wrapped a scarf around her neck.[/blockquote]
Let's see if both parts of our sentence can stand alone as independent clauses:

• Europa has long been considered far too cold to support life.

• With 60 square miles of water thought to be frozen from top to bottom.

We see right away that the second part of our sentence is not a complete thought. We can eliminate A, leaving us with B as the correct answer.

Now, if we didn't recognize the idiom error in the sentence, we can eliminate A based on the reasoning above and continue to use sentence structure to eliminate answers. We see that a few of our answer choices have additional pieces of the sentence set off by commas that we can remove:

• B. Jupiter's moon Europa has long been considered far too cold to support life.

• D. Jupiter's moon Europa and its 60 square miles of water thought to be frozen from top to bottom.

• E. Jupiter's moon Europa and to have 60 square miles of water thought to be frozen from top to bottom.

As expected, B looks fine. However, we see that D and E don't make much sense once we remove the "unnecessary" parts of the sentence. We can eliminate both, leaving us with B, C, and a 50% chance of guessing correctly.

We actually featured this problem recently on the PrepScholar GMAT blog as one of the 5 Hardest Sentence Correction Questions. I recommend checking out the article for more strategies and trends we can take away from this and other 700+ level problems!