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OE makes me confused. HELP! About pronoun.

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OE makes me confused. HELP! About pronoun.

by rx_11 » Thu Nov 11, 2010 12:46 am
In late 1997, the chambers inside the pyramid of the Pharaoh Menkaure at Giza were closed to visitors for cleaning and repair due to moisture exhaled by tourists, which raised its humidity to such levels so that salt from the stone was crystallizing and fungus was growing on the walls.

(A) due to moisture exhaled by tourists, which raised its humidity to such levels so that salt from the stone was crystallizing
(B) due to moisture that tourists had exhaled, thereby raising its humidity to such levels that salt from the stone would crystallize
(C) because tourists were exhaling moisture, which had raised the humidity within them to levels such that salt from the stone would crystallize
(D) because of moisture that was exhaled by tourists raising the humidity within them to levels so high as to make the salt from the stone crystallize
(E) because moisture exhaled by tourists had raised the humidity within them to such levels that salt from the stone was crystallizing
































Hi, everyone, I got stucked with this one.

The OA is E

According to the parallism and agreement, it is not hard to choose the correct answer. However, the OE makes me confused because it says 'them' in C & D are ambiguous while in E it is correct. I found they have no differences. Can anyone explain why "them" in C & D are incorrect but in E it is correct?
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by David@VeritasPrep » Thu Nov 11, 2010 4:39 am
I actually had a bit of a chuckle with this one! I guess too much GMAT has warped my sense of humor...

The problem in C and D is that - unlike E - there is no proper containment of the the "tourists." You see in answer choice E "exhaled by tourists" is a clear, limited modifier applying to moisture. Try reading the "because" clause without the modifier and it works "because moisture...had raised the humidity levels..."

In C and D, especially in C "tourists" is positioned in such a way that "tourists" is not clearly confined and cannot easily be lifted from the sentence. In fact, in C "tourists" is the subject of the because clause making it unclear whether the humidity was raised in the chambers or in the tourists (which is what I found humorous). D suffers from the same problem, the positioning of the -ing modifier could clearly signal that this modifier is applied to the previous word, "tourists."

I applaud your efforts to make sure you understand every possible angle, just remember, as a strategy, you always want to use your best decision point first. So if the other errors you talked about - parallelism and agreement - are working for you on this particular sentence use those first. On some other sentence you might need the ambiguity. You only have to eliminate wrong choices for one valid reason in order for "them" to be eliminated.
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by rx_11 » Thu Nov 11, 2010 5:35 am
David@VeritasPrep wrote:I actually had a bit of a chuckle with this one! I guess too much GMAT has warped my sense of humor...

The problem in C and D is that - unlike E - there is no proper containment of the the "tourists." You see in answer choice E "exhaled by tourists" is a clear, limited modifier applying to moisture. Try reading the "because" clause without the modifier and it works "because moisture...had raised the humidity levels..."

In C and D, especially in C "tourists" is positioned in such a way that "tourists" is not clearly confined and cannot easily be lifted from the sentence. In fact, in C "tourists" is the subject of the because clause making it unclear whether the humidity was raised in the chambers or in the tourists (which is what I found humorous). D suffers from the same problem, the positioning of the -ing modifier could clearly signal that this modifier is applied to the previous word, "tourists."

I applaud your efforts to make sure you understand every possible angle, just remember, as a strategy, you always want to use your best decision point first. So if the other errors you talked about - parallelism and agreement - are working for you on this particular sentence use those first. On some other sentence you might need the ambiguity. You only have to eliminate wrong choices for one valid reason in order for "them" to be eliminated.




lol
:) Thank you David~ :)
B-)
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