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by nadia1989 » Thu Apr 24, 2014 4:22 pm
Iam confused. I dont know when i should repeat that in parallel phrases?

Consider the sentence below:

Fossils of whale that beached on an african shore more than a milion years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by paleonthologist.
I think the correct format of the sentence is : ....whale That beached ... And that was ....
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by [email protected] » Thu Apr 24, 2014 7:49 pm
Hi nadia1989,

What is the source of this sentence? Did it come from an SC question, a magazine article or some other source? I ask because the sentence appears to have some typos and grammatical errors.

It's worth noting that many writers don't actually write using grammatically accurate language, so if this came from a magazine (or internet) article, then it might not be a valid example of "GMAT grammar." If your goal is to learn/practice for SCs on the GMAT, then you should be sure to focus on established GMAT practice material.

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by aditya8062 » Thu Apr 24, 2014 8:17 pm
Fossils of whale that beached on an african shore more than a milion years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by paleonthologist.

the parallelism in this sentence is :whale that beached .......AND whale that was subsequently butchered
the intended meaning is that there was was some whale that might have come along a beach and then it was subsequently butchered .the fossils of this whale have been discovered

we do not need to repeat "that" .at times when clauses are big then we can repeat "that" but here it is not needed .also this sentence seems oki
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by nadia1989 » Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:21 pm
[email protected] wrote:Hi nadia1989,

What is the source of this sentence? Did it come from an SC question, a magazine article or some other source? I ask because the sentence appears to have some typos and grammatical errors.

It's worth noting that many writers don't actually write using grammatically accurate language, so if this came from a magazine (or internet) article, then it might not be a valid example of "GMAT grammar." If your goal is to learn/practice for SCs on the GMAT, then you should be sure to focus on established GMAT practice material.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich


This sentence is a correct answer in one of the Gmac's exams.
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by nadia1989 » Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:35 pm
aditya8062 wrote:Fossils of whale that beached on an african shore more than a milion years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by paleonthologist.

the parallelism in this sentence is :whale that beached .......AND whale that was subsequently butchered
the intended meaning is that there was was some whale that might have come along a beach and then it was subsequently butchered .the fossils of this whale have been discovered

we do not need to repeat "that" .at times when clauses are big then we can repeat "that" but here it is not needed .also this sentence seems oki

I agree with you. I think we do not need to repeat "that" because it is understood from the first part of the sentence. I think in cases which parallelism between parts of the sentence is not clear, we have to repeat "that". As a matter of fact, this issue relates to concision.
What is your idea? Am I right?
Last edited by nadia1989 on Thu Apr 24, 2014 10:09 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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by aditya8062 » Thu Apr 24, 2014 9:39 pm
well as i have said putting "that" in the later part will not make it wrong .also if clauses are very big then GMAT might repeat "that". the whole point is that parallelism should be maintained
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by nadia1989 » Thu Apr 24, 2014 10:10 pm
You' re right. In cases which we have some clause-part of the sentence which contains a subject and predicate- parallel to each other, we should start the clauses with same word. The example below is written in manhattan sentence correction.
EX: I want to retire to a place where I can relax and where taxes are low.
" that" also obeys this rule.
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by [email protected] » Thu Apr 24, 2014 10:51 pm
Hi nadia1989,

I asked earlier about the source because if it IS the correct answer to a GMAC SC prompt, then someone did not transcribe it correctly (either you or whoever transcribed it to the source that you were using). The original sentence is actually:

Fossils of a whale that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by paleontologists.

The subject-verb agreement is fine in this sentence and so is the parallelism (the word "that" refers to the whale that was BEACHED and BUTCHERED).

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