Sentence Correction

bubbliiiiiiii wrote:

iongmat wrote:Ron Sir, not to belabor, but following example in OG Verbal caught my attention:

In the 1980s the largest single provider of day care for children was the federal government, which offered child care, health, and educational services to hundreds of thousands of children from poor households through the Head Start program and which supported private day-care facilities through child-care tax credits, state block grants, and tax breaks for employers who subsidized day-care services.

The OE says: Because the second example is given as a relative clause beginning with which supported private, the first example must be similarly presented The opening statement must therefore present government as the predicate noun so that which clearly refers to government in both of the examples.

Does it have something to do with which (that the above statement uses) Vs that.

I am finding this quite tough, but hopefully others are also benefiting with this conversation.

From your post I believe that the first which part is underlined whereas the second which was nonunderlined.

If my assumption is correct, then considering the parallelism indicator AND we have to scan from right to left (if you have read earlier post or have seen the video you would understand what I am referring to.). Since the second part of the sentence, which is non-underlined, contains a 'which' after and we have to make sure that we have a 'which' before and as well and thats what the OA intends to say.

Please correct incase I am wrong.

bubbblliii (haha i have no idea how many l's and i's are in your handle) --

nicely done, again.

this explanation is *not* saying that you actually have to have the 2 "which"s; it is just saying that, because there is a non-underlined "which" in the second part, you need a similar construction in the first part.

[email protected] wrote:In C, 'come' refers to 'benefits' and 'inhibit' refers to compounds ... so here the real parallelism is: ARE || INHIBIT, as both the verbs refer to the same subject: compounds (as per D).

the previous poster was pointing out that the actual writing of choice (c) places "come" in parallel to "inhibit". (i.e., that answer choice contains "...and inhibit...", which must be parallel to another verb. the only other verb IN THAT CHOICE is "come", so the resultant parallel structure is "come and inhibit".
this structure isn't reasonable in terms of meaning -- because, as you point out, "come" and "benefit" SHOULD have different subjects -- and so it's incorrect.

what i find a bit confusing here is that you're saying that "the real parallelism" (i.e., in choice (C)) is are || inhibit -- but the word "are" is not even present in choice (c).

if what you meant was ...
the intended meaning of the sentence is to place "are" and "inhibit" -- two facts about the compounds -- in parallel; this intended meaning is not present in (c)
... then yes.

This is one of the best questions to understand subtle parallelism.

i think it's best to avoid trying to define different degrees of parallelism.
i.e., i'm not sure what you mean by "subtle" here, but, basically, parallelism is parallelism is parallelism; there's really no such thing as parallelism that is more or less "subtle".
this sounds like nitpicking, but it's important for aspirants to understand that parallelism is, essentially, binary: on/off, one/zero, parallel/not parallel. thinking in terms of "subtlety", which is largely nonexistent in this context, can do considerable harm to that understanding.

Also, there is no "that and that" clause parallelism in this sentence. THAT here is a pronoun referring to COMPOUNDS...

Though by coincidence, you may feel that there is THAT and THAT parallelism here.

the correct answer (d) is written with the parallel structure that x and that y. this is an objective feature of that answer choice, so what "you may feel" does not enter into consideration.
compounds that are also found in beta carotene, vitamin E, and vitamin C and that inhibit...
the construction following "and" is "THAT inhibit", so the THAT is definitely, objectively, part of the parallel structure.

clarification:

*if* you took out the SECOND "that", then you would have a structure that would be technically ok ...
compounds that are also found in beta carotene, vitamin E, and vitamin C and inhibit ...
in THIS case the "that" construction is not part of the parallel structure, because there is no more "that" following and.

ON THE OTHER HAND
*if* you took out the FIRST "that", then you would have the following structure:
compounds are also found in beta carotene, vitamin E, and vitamin C and that inhibit...
this construction is flat-out incorrect -- the right-hand construction is "that + verb", and there is no matching construction on the left.

--

again, there is really no "subtlety" here -- if you understand how to process these structures (and understand that they have to be processed from right to left, in the case of single signals such as "and" and "or"), then it becomes a black-and-white issue.

more in the may 13 lecture recording here:
https://www.manhattangmat.com/thursdays-with-ron.cfm

iongmat wrote:Some more examples, while I was trying to determine a "pattern" of when GMAT would like to repeat "that"

Verbal supplement Q3: OE- The repetition of "that" to introduce two subordinate clauses makes the construction parallel and correct.

this problem is irrelevant to the issue at hand, because the second "that" is not underlined and therefore not at issue.
if the SECOND "that" is there, then, yes, you clearly need the first one; that's simple parallelism.

OG Q128: OE:The two dependent clauses beginning with "that" are in parallel form and contain verbs in the correct tenses.

OG Q139: OE: The addition of "that" before its business would creates another parallel clause associated with announced and clarifies that there is a second announcement.

Seems to me that (perhaps) when "that" is used as a subordinating conjunction, then chances are more that "that" would be repeated.

perhaps, although neither of these problems presents the issue as a straight contrast; in each case, the other choices have other fatal errors as well.

--

this seems to be an extremely minor, rather trifling issue; i'm worried that concentrating excessively on it will harm your greater ability to find parallelism in general.

are you finding ALL of the other parallelism issues in 100% of the problems in which parallelism is at issue?
if not, then you should probably drop this issue until you are; it's important to have the right priorities in SC.