akhpad wrote:Source: Knewton
An exemplary mimic, the harmless soldier fly has a body that resembles those of the stinging black wasp and thus is able to frighten away predators.
A: the harmless soldier fly has a body that resembles those of the stinging black wasp
B: the harmless soldier fly has a body resembling that of a stinging black wasp
C: the body of the harmless soldier fly resembles a stinging black wasp's
D: the harmless soldier fly's body resembles the stinging black wasps'
E: the body of the harmless soldier fly resembles those of the stinging black wasps
I confused in modifier in context of meaning.
An exemplary mimic => I believe that it is a model and it should refer to "the harmless soldier fly" or "the body". I confused in selecting here.
OA: B
Let's attack these issues one by one.
(1) As noted by earlier posters, the lead-in modifier "An exemplary mimic" must be followed immediately by the noun it is modifying. We can gather that the mimic is meant to be the animal from both the definition of mimic (it needs to be something that can "perform" the action, so the fly itself makes more sense than the body) and the remainder of the sentence (the mimic is able to frighten away predators - this is the fly, not the body doing the frightening). This actually eliminates C, D and E. Notice that in D, the lead-in modifier is followed by "the harmless soldier fly's
body." The fly only shows up as a possessive modifier and not the noun itself; the lead-in is back to modifying body again. In C and E it is more obvious that "the body" is the modified noun.
(2) Now for the debate between A and B. The real crux is the use of the plural term "those". The "body" is singular as is the "stinging black wasp", so the plural pronoun is incorrect.
So to sum it up - we drop C, D and E due to the modifier issue, and A loses on a pronoun.
Hope this helps!
Whit
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