Sentence Correction

Quick note up top: the question as written doesn't have any correct answers. In both D and E, "contribution" should be "contributions" - right now, singular noun "contribution" doesn't match up with plural verb "include".

So you did a great job picking up on the fact that there is a modifier issue in this sentence. The modifier here is the first chunk of our sentence up until the comma:

"In addition to her work on the Miocene hominid fossil record"

So the modifier is about something Mary leaky did: a piece of her work. The subject of this modifier is something that is "in addition" to a piece of Mary Leaky's work. Just like we want to compare two things that are similar, it only makes sense to add two similar things. Our answers provide us to options:

1) A, B, C: Mary Leaky is in addition to her work on the Miocene hominid fossil record
2) D, E: Mary Leaky's contribution to archeology is in addition to her work on the Miocene hominid fossil record

The second option is better: why would we be saying that a person is in addition to her work? It makes more sense to say that Mary Leaky's other work is in addition to her work on something else. Similarly, we should notice the parallelism in D and E:

• Mary Leaky's contribution to archeology

• her work on the Miocene hominid fossil record

So we can rule out A through C.

Now assuming that we actually have "contributions" in D and E, we can look at parallelism. We notice that Mary Leaky has two contributions mentioned in the sentence. Looking at D, they are:

Mary Leakey's contribution to archaeology include:

• her discovery of the earliest direct evidence of hominid activity

• her painstaking documentation of East African cave paintings

Because we have a list of contributions, they must be parallel. In D, we see that they are:

Mary Leakey's contributions to archaeology include:

• her discovery of the earliest direct evidence of hominid activity

• her painstaking documentation of East African cave paintings

However, in E, they are not:

Mary Leakey's contributions to archaeology include:

• discovering the earliest direct evidence of hominid activity

• painstaking documentation of East African cave paintings

So we eliminate E and select D.