Birds falling

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Birds falling

by amysky_0205 » Tue Jan 15, 2013 9:33 pm
In the mid-1970's, since birds were overcome by pollution, and routinely falling from the sky above Los Angeles freeways, this prompted officials in California to devise a plan that reduced automobile emissions.

A. since birds were overcome by pollution, and routinely falling from the sky above Los Angeles freeways, this prompted officials in California to devise a plan that reduced
B. since birds that had been overcome by pollution were routinely falling from the sky above Los Angeles freeways, it prompted officials in California to devise a plan that would reduce
C. birds had been overcome by pollution and routinely fell from the sky above Los Angeles freeways, prompting officials in California to devise a plan that reduced
D. birds overcome by pollution routinely fell from the sky above Los Angeles freeways, prompting officials in California to devise a plan to reduce
E. birds overcome by pollution and routinely falling from the sky above Los Angeles freeways, were prompting officials in California to devise a plan to reduce


OA: D

can someone explain this?
thank u!
Source: — Sentence Correction |

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by gmatpart2 » Wed Jan 16, 2013 1:20 am
We know that "and" implies parallelism. So on this basis we can eliminate A, C and E.

A: "were overcome" is not parallel to "falling".
C: "had been overcome" is not parallel to "fell".
E: "overcome" is not parallel to "falling".

B: "it" is ambiguous as we do not know what it is referring to.

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by ceilidh.erickson » Wed Jan 16, 2013 8:47 am
Whenever we see a construction with "and," such as "birds ____ and _____," we certainly want to look for parallelism.

In C, "... have been overcome and routinely fell" is definitely not parallel.

Be careful with A and E, though. The fact that "overcome" is a past participle and "falling" is a present participle does not necessarily mean that they can't be parallel. Consider the following:

After the game, the players were tired and bleeding.

This is a perfectly acceptable construction - both are acceptable descriptors of the players, and it wouldn't make sense to make them parallel. "... were tiring and bleeding" or "were tired and bled" both have different meanings. On the GMAT, it's ok to have past participles parallel to present participles, if the meaning makes sense. See Ron's explanation here: https://www.beatthegmat.com/most-brutal-sc-19-t9879.html

The larger problems with A and E are not problems of parallelism but of meaning.

In A, "this" is being used as a pronoun to refer to the entire idea of birds falling on freeways. The GMAT, generally speaking, does not like pronouns that stand in for general ideas, rather than specific antecedents. B can be eliminated for the same reason - "it" is general/ambiguous.

In E, if we remove all modifiers, we see that the core of the sentence is: "birds... were prompting officials." This doesn't make much sense.

Thus, the only answer choice remaining is D.
Ceilidh Erickson
EdM in Mind, Brain, and Education
Harvard Graduate School of Education

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