Cambridge tests good ones - 5

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Cambridge tests good ones - 5

by arora007 » Thu Jan 20, 2011 9:05 am
Many physicists think that at some time in the next century we will not only discover life in other galaxies but will also communicate with them.

A)we will not only discover life in other galaxies but will also communicate with them.
B)we will discover not only life in other galaxies, but be able to communicate with it.
C)we will not only discover life in other galaxies but we will be able to communicate with it.
D)that not only will we be able to discover life in the other galaxies but be able to communicate to them as well.
E)not only ot find life in other galaxies but to communicate with it as well.

[spoiler]
Third choice is the correct choice. The orignal contains an error of pronoun usage: them fails to agree in number with its referent, life. The third choice solves this problem by substituting it for them. The second choice corrects the error found in the orignal, but it changes the intended meaning of the orignal. The second choice asserts that something in addition to life will be found in other galaxies. As for the fourth choice, the that seems to introduce a noun clause, but the noun clause has already been introduced by an earlier that. Thus, everything contained in the fourth choice is left with no logical connecton to the rest of the sentence. As for the fifth choice, since the that sets up a noun clause, you need a subject and a conjugated verb for the clause. The resulting of using the fifth choice would be a phrase lacking a subject and a conjugated verb.
[/spoiler]
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by prachich1987 » Thu Jan 20, 2011 9:34 am
I think one more error in A is the usage of 2nd WILL

we will not only discover life in other galaxies but will also communicate with them.

It makes no sense to say "we will will also communicate.....

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by highflier_2000 » Thu Jan 20, 2011 12:55 pm
yeah .. It's not clear. Why is C correct ? . I thought A was right .

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by Adam@Knewton » Thu Jan 20, 2011 1:04 pm
arora007 wrote:Many physicists think that at some time in the next century we will not only discover life in other galaxies but will also communicate with them.

A)we will not only discover life in other galaxies but will also communicate with them.
B)we will discover not only life in other galaxies, but be able to communicate with it.
C)we will not only discover life in other galaxies but we will be able to communicate with it.
D)that not only will we be able to discover life in the other galaxies but be able to communicate to them as well.
E)not only ot find life in other galaxies but to communicate with it as well.
I agree that this question seems broken. (A) cannot be right because "them" cannot refer to the singluar "life." (D) repeats the "that" from earlier in the sentence and has parallelism errors. (E) leaves the clause incomplete by removing a conjugate verb, as arora properly explained. (B) and (C), meanwhile, both contain parallelism errors. The proper construction is either "Not only X but also Y" or "Not only X but Y," where X and Y are parallel.

In (B), the X and Y are:
"life in other galaxies" and "be able to communicate with it."
One of these is a noun phrase, the other a verb phrase. They are not parallel. (B) could be correct if we put the "not only" before the "discover," because then we'd have two parallel verb phrases, distrubing the "will" to both, following our correleative pair.

In (C), the X and Y are:
"discover life in other galaxies" and "we will be able to communicate with it."
The first is a verb phrase whereas the second is a complete clause with subject and verb. As prachich has pointed out above, the "we will" is therefore repeated, and (C) is unparallel and wrong. One example of a correct version of (C) would be to drop the "we will" after the "but," which creates the same sentence as I suggested above for (B).

So, I'm sorry to say, but I think this is a broken question with no correct answer as it is currently written.
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by Target2009 » Thu Jan 20, 2011 8:27 pm
IMO - C
correct idiom Not only X .. but also Y: B D E out
A : Them is plural .. where as life is singular.
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