Hey guys,
Got a PM on this one and, shoot, even if you take the grammar problems that exist outside the underline as typos, the sentence still isn't a great one, so I think you can find better problems to study from.
**"An earthquake strike" violates Subject-Verb agreement. One earthquake would go with "strikes". However...
**That's a weird tense to use, because indicative tense is for something that happens regularly, but this sentence is about one earthquake. And any particular earthquake only happens once. So it probably should be "an earthquake struck" (past tense).
**But then, even with that, the sentence doesn't really have any reason to exist. There's no real reason to mention Calcutta unless you include a modifier or some other way to describe why you'd mention where the earthquake DIDN'T strike. So you could say:
"Surprisingly, the largest earthquake to hit the continental United States this year did not occur in California, where earthquake strikes are common, but instead took place in Virginia, where an earthquake hadn't been felt in decades."
There, you have a justification for the "Not in X, but in Y" construction, since it's surprising that it didn't happen in X. But you wouldn't say:
"The greatest fighter of all time is not me, but Muhammad Ali." There's no reason to think that it's "me", so it's a weird sentence to even write in the first place.
**Then one other thing that bugs me about this sentence...Calcutta vs. "other coastal areas" is kind of strange, too - the earthquake really only strikes one place, but then is felt for a large radius around. One earthquake can't logically strike several areas.
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So...I don't think this is a great question. And since we can't really trust the earthquake/Calcutta/coastal-areas setup, then I don't think you can accurately decide between A and E.
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
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