lunarpower wrote:i can vouch that this is an official GMATPREP problem.
Uri wrote:Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.
"it" seems ambiguous: commitment or course of action?
YES.
"it" is ambiguous here, for exactly the reasons you have outlined.
Hi, can't we say that 'it' refers to 'heavy commitment' as 'heavy commitment ' and 'it' both are used as 'subject' of 2 different fragments.... pl. reply........
by the way, this is PRECISELY the reason why they chose to write "being heavily committed", rather than "heavy commitment", in the correct answer. see the discussion of that answer, below.
An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that worked well in the past, makes missing signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting ones likely when they do appear.
Changes the meaning. The fault here is transferred from commitment to the executive!
yeah.
there are also other problems, such as "misinterpreting ones", as well as the general ridiculous sloppiness of this sentence.
An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past.
I think there is modifier issue in this choice
it's more the pronoun issue.
the best way i can explain it to non-native speakers of english is that "it" could potentially stand for "incipient trouble" and is thus ambiguous (especially in light of the fact that "incipient trouble" is WAY WAY closer to "it" than is the properly intended antecedent).
to any native english speakers reading this post, you should reflexively find ugliness in this pronoun. in other words, you just won't know what "it" is supposed to stand for, unless you go back through the sentence at least one more time and hunt for an antecedent.
Executives� being heavily committed to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes them likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting them when they do appear.
the apostrophe is perhaps not needed. Also concerned with "being"
you missed what is easily the most important problem with this part: the blatant lack of parallelism between "miss" and "misinterpreting".
these two ideas are clearly parallel, and they're presented in tandem, so they have to have parallel grammatical structures.
Being heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that has worked well in the past, is likely to make an executive miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.
once again worried with "being". don't think it is necessary here.[/quote]
well, you clearly can't just OMIT "being", i.e., say "heavily committed" by itself. if you try to do that, then the sentence won't have a subject at all.
(if you don't understand this, post back)
see next post for details on why (e) is the best choice here.