A groundbreaking neuro-psychological research

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BTGmoderatorDC: Moderator; Posts: 7187; Joined: Thu Sep 07, 2017 4:43 pm; Followed by:23 members

A groundbreaking neuro-psychological research

by BTGmoderatorDC » Mon Jan 08, 2018 5:29 pm

A groundbreaking neuro-psychological research was conducted on epilepsy patients, whom brains' neural activity is regularly monitored, and have discovered that memories of past events are stored in the same neurons in the brain which were active during the original experience.

A. whom brains' neural activity is regularly monitored, and have discovered that
B. whom brains' neural activity is regularly monitored, and has discovered that
C. whose brains' neural activity is regularly monitored, and have discovered that
D. using data from the regular monitoring of their neural activity to establish that
E. using data from the regularly monitoring of their neural activity to establish

What is wrong with Option A and C?

OA D

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Source: Beat The GMAT — Sentence Correction | Mon Jan 08, 2018 5:29 pm

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ErikaPrepScholar: Legendary Member; Posts: 503; Joined: Thu Jul 20, 2017 9:03 am; Thanked: 86 times; Followed by:15 members; GMAT Score:770

by ErikaPrepScholar » Tue Jan 09, 2018 5:35 am

A. Quick trick for figuring out when "whom" will work - if you can replace "whom" with "him" or "her" it works. If you can't, it doesn't. Here, "him brains' neural connection" doesn't make any sense. We need a possessive pronoun here - the brains belong to these people. So "whom" doesn't work.

We should also recognize that everything from "whom brains'" to "monitored" is set off by commas. This means we should be able to remove it and still have a grammatical sentence:

A groundbreaking neuro-psychological research was conducted on epilepsy patients and have discovered that memories of past events are stored in the same neurons in the brain which were active during the original experience.

This makes it much more clear that both the verbs "was" and "have discovered" go with the subject "research". "Research" is singular, so "have discovered" should also be singular - "has discovered". So we have an agreement error in addition to a pronoun error. Eliminate.

C. Here we have "whose", which is a possessive pronoun and works in the sentence! However, we still have "have discovered", which still doesn't agree with "research". Eliminate.