Good question - and the usage of "to suggest" here isn't the "in order to" version of the infinitive...it's more like:

"I've found a maid to clean my apartment."

or

"We've hired an outside firm to serve our IT needs."

This explanation will be woefully untechnical, but words like "to" and "that" serve a bunch of purposes, but mainly just to keep sentences clean and verbs separate. Which is why I'd advise that you focus on the more binary decision points first - I've spoken English for over 30 years and have to admit that I preferred the forms of "suggest" in A and C, but I also know that there are too many subtle usages of "to" and "that" for me to feel 100% confident making that my primary decision point, so I started to look also at:

-Verb tense - "had descended" in C and D is incorrect because there's no related past-tense event that necessitates "had" (it's not "...had descended from an aquatic animal long before the coyote, originally thought to be the proper ancestor, ever entered the fossil record" or anything like that that would put a related past-tense event there0

-Parallel structure and sentence structure - A is wrong because "and its trunk originally evolving" doesn't connect back at all to the verb "suggests", and even so "suggesting" in that structure is a verb and not a modifier, so it's in the wrong tense. And B has similar problem - "has suggested the elephant" needs a separator in there ("has suggested that the elephant"), and the verb tense "has suggested" is off logically.

One important part of SC strategy is realizing that correct answers are going to have phrasing in them that isn't the way you'd necessarily prefer to see it. You have to be able to accept some things that don't quite sound or feel right, but that are left standing once you've knocked off the other four choices for more direct causes. At Veritas Prep we call that "hiding the correct answer / selling the incorrect answer". The test knows that it can hide the right answer behind unpopular (but acceptable) structures that you won't recognize or like, and it can sell you the wrong answer by packaging it in a structure that you feel comfortable with. This question is a great example - notice that the "false decision point" you're looking at is within the first couple words of each answer choice. That's by design - the test is baiting you into eliminating the correct answer choice before you ever get to the major decision points being tested (parallelism, verb tense).

So to say it more succinctly - prioritize the decision points that you can absolutely master (tense, agreement, pronouns, modifiers) and go to the more nuanced portions of grammar only after you've eliminated the bigger stuff. You'll likely find that you get 90+% of your decisions made on the items you've mastered if you can think of it that way.

Brian@VeritasPrep wrote:Good question - and the usage of "to suggest" here isn't the "in order to" version of the infinitive...it's more like:

"I've found a maid to clean my apartment."

or

"We've hired an outside firm to serve our IT needs."

This explanation will be woefully untechnical, but words like "to" and "that" serve a bunch of purposes, but mainly just to keep sentences clean and verbs separate. Which is why I'd advise that you focus on the more binary decision points first - I've spoken English for over 30 years and have to admit that I preferred the forms of "suggest" in A and C, but I also know that there are too many subtle usages of "to" and "that" for me to feel 100% confident making that my primary decision point, so I started to look also at:

-Verb tense - "had descended" in C and D is incorrect because there's no related past-tense event that necessitates "had" (it's not "...had descended from an aquatic animal long before the coyote, originally thought to be the proper ancestor, ever entered the fossil record" or anything like that that would put a related past-tense event there0

-Parallel structure and sentence structure - A is wrong because "and its trunk originally evolving" doesn't connect back at all to the verb "suggests", and even so "suggesting" in that structure is a verb and not a modifier, so it's in the wrong tense. And B has similar problem - "has suggested the elephant" needs a separator in there ("has suggested that the elephant"), and the verb tense "has suggested" is off logically.

One important part of SC strategy is realizing that correct answers are going to have phrasing in them that isn't the way you'd necessarily prefer to see it. You have to be able to accept some things that don't quite sound or feel right, but that are left standing once you've knocked off the other four choices for more direct causes. At Veritas Prep we call that "hiding the correct answer / selling the incorrect answer". The test knows that it can hide the right answer behind unpopular (but acceptable) structures that you won't recognize or like, and it can sell you the wrong answer by packaging it in a structure that you feel comfortable with. This question is a great example - notice that the "false decision point" you're looking at is within the first couple words of each answer choice. That's by design - the test is baiting you into eliminating the correct answer choice before you ever get to the major decision points being tested (parallelism, verb tense).

So to say it more succinctly - prioritize the decision points that you can absolutely master (tense, agreement, pronouns, modifiers) and go to the more nuanced portions of grammar only after you've eliminated the bigger stuff. You'll likely find that you get 90+% of your decisions made on the items you've mastered if you can think of it that way.

Thanks Brian. Your explanation is really helpful.