Sentence Correction

[quote="lunarpower
this is correct. specifically, the grammar of (a) has no real problems - but, as noted in my post above, it just doesn't say what it's supposed to say.

yes, context is every bit as important as grammar.[/quote]

Ron you say that grammer of A is correct, however what about Suggests - Australian Ebryologits i.e. plural, so we need a plural verb i.e. suggest. Can you please explain.

Also what is wrong with C, I see that you mentioned that had descended is wrong, but why is it wrong

Thanks for the response Ron,

Vineet

lunarpower wrote:

Ron you say that grammer of A is correct, however what about Suggests - Australian Ebryologits i.e. plural, so we need a plural verb i.e. suggest. Can you please explain.

it's evidence that suggests..., so "evidence" (not "embryologists") is the subject of that particular verb.

Also what is wrong with C, I see that you mentioned that had descended is wrong, but why is it wrong

there are two reasons.
* first, the past perfect is inappropriate, because there's no later past time marker (as is necessary for the past perfect).
* second, the meaning is incorrect ("is descended" has the correct meaning). i explained the difference in meaning here:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/australian-e ... tml#186411

Anwser Choice A posted is not correct..its as given below:

"that suggests that the elephant is descended from an aquatic animal, and its trunk originally evolving as a kind of snorkel"

One more reason why choice A is wrong is that ...In choice A the clause after ",and" should be independent and should have S V pair...

But if you closely look at the choice A you will notice in the clause after ",and" the verb is missing ..hence choice A is wrong.

Hi Ron,

About choice C, could you justify my resanong?

firstly, the original meaning of the sentence is the the evidence suggests 2 things, but "with its trunk..." in choice C makes the second thing a modifier therefore not in the main structure of this sentence, therefore changes the meaning.

Second,"with its trunk evolved" made "evolve" in a passive voice, which is illogical.

but I'm not sure, if we wanna the trunk thing to be a modifer, and we say that as "with its trunk evloving..." ,will it be right?

About "with", I'm wondering whether we can use "With+subject+ Ving/Ved" ,as I know "because of +S+Ving" is wrong, so I wanna confirm if "with" is the same case.

Thank you very much!

In option A, can we not consider part of sentence after comma as additional information about how elephant evolved? or is the parallel rule (with and) absolute in all scenarios?

(A) that suggests that the elephant is descended from an aquatic animal, and its trunk originally evolved

lunarpower wrote:

arorag wrote:Why E is superior to A????

(a) is actually INCORRECT, not just awkward, because of the way parallelism is indicated by the comma.

if you have a comma before a coordinating conjunction - as in "X, and Y" - then X and Y MUST be parallel clauses.

with this in mind, let's turn to (a):
Australian embryologists have found evidence that suggests that the elephant is descended from an aquatic animal,
and
its trunk originally evolved as a kind of snorkel.

in other words, the embryologists have found evidence regarding the elephant's ancestry - but NOT about the trunk (this is just stated as a standalone fact).

if you remove the comma, then (a) becomes a viable answer.

Hi Ron,

Could you help me understand the difference between X, and Y and X and Y.
How is the rule of parallelism different for them.

lunarpower wrote:

arorag wrote:Why E is superior to A????

(a) is actually INCORRECT, not just awkward, because of the way parallelism is indicated by the comma.

if you have a comma before a coordinating conjunction - as in "X, and Y" - then X and Y MUST be parallel clauses.

with this in mind, let's turn to (a):
Australian embryologists have found evidence that suggests that the elephant is descended from an aquatic animal,
and
its trunk originally evolved as a kind of snorkel.

in other words, the embryologists have found evidence regarding the elephant's ancestry - but NOT about the trunk (this is just stated as a standalone fact).

if you remove the comma, then (a) becomes a viable answer.

Hi Ron,

You wrote the below mentioned on the previous page in the same thread.

"if you remove the comma, then (a) becomes a viable answer."

So if option option "a" becomes a viable answer when we remove the comma, then basically you mean to say that clause 2 is not rendered independent of clause 1 (when we remove the comma)? Because if that were the case, then even "clause + and + clause" would be wrong.

lunarpower wrote:

Mission2012 wrote:Hi Ron,

Could you help me understand the difference between X, and Y and X and Y.
How is the rule of parallelism different for them.

ok, here's a better explanation of that.

if comma + AND is followed by a complete sentence ("independent clause"), then the clauses before and after AND should make sense as parallel statements.

e.g.
stephanie told me that her son was sick and she would need an extra day to finish the project.
--> this sentence makes sense, with "her son was sick" and "she would need an extra day..." in parallel.

stephanie told me that her son was sick, and she would need an extra day to finish the project.
--> this sentence doesn't make sense.
the comma construction implies that "stephanie told me that her son was sick" and "she would need an extra day to finish the project" are separate and parallel. that interpretation doesn't make sense; the sensible interpretation of the sentence is that stephanie told me both things, but, according to this parallelism (in which the two sentences are separate ideas), stephanie only told me thing #1.[/b]

great, Ron, thank you.

I can summarize:

'comma+and" is used to connect 2 independent clauses

"and" without comma is used to conect 2 entities which are not independent clauses. The 2 entities can be noun, adjective, adverb and many other things.

is my thinking correct? Ron, pls confirm.

regarding the sentence
stephanie told me that her son was sick and she would need an extra day to finish the project

though this sentence can be considered correct according to the rule I have said, this sentence dose not appear on gmat. we will alway meet the pattern "told me THAT ... AND THAT", which is more clear as you said.

pls, confirm my thinking. Thank you Ron.

lunarpower wrote:
(a) is actually INCORRECT, not just awkward, because of the way parallelism is indicated by the comma.

if you have a comma before a coordinating conjunction - as in "X, and Y" - then X and Y MUST be parallel clauses.

with this in mind, let's turn to (a):
Australian embryologists have found evidence that suggests that the elephant is descended from an aquatic animal,
and
its trunk originally evolved as a kind of snorkel.

in other words, the embryologists have found evidence regarding the elephant's ancestry - but NOT about the trunk (this is just stated as a standalone fact).

if you remove the comma, then (a) becomes a viable answer.

Hi Ron,

I understand the parallelism error in A. (, conjunction concept )

Options C and D are incorrect owing to the incorrect idiom 'had descended' which suggests 'descended from a height' whereas here we are referring to ancestral descendance.

Could you explain why option B is incorrect ? Is it because 'its trunk originally evolving' is a modifier which is modifying the aquatic animals ?

Appreciate your help !