Sentence Correction

This is right on:

In the 1930s the region of Crozes-Hermitage was the most profitable appellation producing red wines for export, bottling Syrah wines, a dark red wine with tastes of chocolate, hints of espresso, and traces of white grapes for additional flavor and variety and which earned the largest percentage of taxable income through wine exports proportional to its geographic size of any wine-producing region of the country.

the catch was the words in red above, its important to read the non underlined part of the sentence and look for parallelism indicators before scanning the answer choices vertically.

Well put, Bacardi Blast . As I read the sentence given, I start getting a headache, and then suddenly I see "and which earned" and think, "Wait a minute. If I'm stuck with that, I need to introduce an initial 'which [did something]' if I'm going to get a away with this 'and which earned' here." So right away I can narrow my choices down to (B) and (E) -- and then (B) gets cut because I can't say "...the 1930s, which bottled," since the 1930s themselves didn't bottle anything. So (E) it is.

Additional tip: if you find the original sentence so cluttered and confusing that you get lost in it, try cutting out the whole appositive for Syrah wines, i.e. from "a dark red..." all the way through "and variety" -- all of that is just "defining" Syrah wines, so we can safely lose it. That way the sentence is pared down to a simpler

In the 1930s the region of Crozes-Hermitage was the most profitable appellation producing red wines for export, bottling Syrah wines and which earned the largest percentage of taxable income through wine exports proportional to its geographic size of any wine-producing region of the country.

Furthermore, even though it fudges the *meaning* a bit, grammatically we don't care what was earned since that end part of the sentence isn't underlined, so we can pare the sentence down even more and just make up our own simpler noun to sub in for what was earned:

In the 1930s the region of Crozes-Hermitage was the most profitable appellation producing red wines for export, bottling Syrah wines and which earned a prize.

After all that trimming, it becomes a lot more manageable to figure out that the original version doesn't sound right and also to determine which answer choice will work, even if the parallelism cue hasn't jumped out at you.

Best,

thanks Ashley for the add on perfect analysis on how to approach a long convoluted sentence.

what was the original sentence please......

bblast wrote:thanks Ashley for the add on perfect analysis on how to approach a long convoluted sentence.

Missed pag1 please ignore

venmic wrote:what was the original sentence please......

bblast wrote:thanks Ashley for the add on perfect analysis on how to approach a long convoluted sentence.

Can you please explain what is wrong with B

Ashley@VeritasPrep wrote:This is right on:

In the 1930s the region of Crozes-Hermitage was the most profitable appellation producing red wines for export, bottling Syrah wines, a dark red wine with tastes of chocolate, hints of espresso, and traces of white grapes for additional flavor and variety and which earned the largest percentage of taxable income through wine exports proportional to its geographic size of any wine-producing region of the country.

the catch was the words in red above, its important to read the non underlined part of the sentence and look for parallelism indicators before scanning the answer choices vertically.

Well put, Bacardi Blast . As I read the sentence given, I start getting a headache, and then suddenly I see "and which earned" and think, "Wait a minute. If I'm stuck with that, I need to introduce an initial 'which [did something]' if I'm going to get a away with this 'and which earned' here." So right away I can narrow my choices down to (B) and (E) -- and then (B) gets cut because I can't say "...the 1930s, which bottled," since the 1930s themselves didn't bottle anything. So (E) it is.

Additional tip: if you find the original sentence so cluttered and confusing that you get lost in it, try cutting out the whole appositive for Syrah wines, i.e. from "a dark red..." all the way through "and variety" -- all of that is just "defining" Syrah wines, so we can safely lose it. That way the sentence is pared down to a simpler

In the 1930s the region of Crozes-Hermitage was the most profitable appellation producing red wines for export, bottling Syrah wines and which earned the largest percentage of taxable income through wine exports proportional to its geographic size of any wine-producing region of the country.

Furthermore, even though it fudges the *meaning* a bit, grammatically we don't care what was earned since that end part of the sentence isn't underlined, so we can pare the sentence down even more and just make up our own simpler noun to sub in for what was earned:

In the 1930s the region of Crozes-Hermitage was the most profitable appellation producing red wines for export, bottling Syrah wines and which earned a prize.

After all that trimming, it becomes a lot more manageable to figure out that the original version doesn't sound right and also to determine which answer choice will work, even if the parallelism cue hasn't jumped out at you.

Best,

venmic wrote:Can you please explain what is wrong with B

Hi there,

So (B) says

The region of Crozes-Hermitage was the most profitable appellation producing red wines for export in the 1930s, which bottled

The problem lies in the "1930s, which bottled..." The word "which" (or "who" or "whose") is always going to grab onto the noun *immediately* preceding it -- in this case, the 1930s. In other words, this construction would mean that the 1930s bottled Syrah wines. But since a decade doesn't have hands, it can't bottle wine , so that can't be what the sentence intends to say.

Another example: If I were to say, "I lost my passport, which was a disaster," "which" would latch onto "passport," so this sentence would mean that my passport itself was a disaster. But that's most likely not what I want to say, of course. What I really mean is that the fact that I LOST my passport was a disaster. So could I fix the problem by saying instead, "I lost my passport, which was a disastrous error on my part"? Well, no, because the "which" is STILL going to latch onto "passport," so all this rephrasing would do is communicate that the passport itself was a disastrous error on my part -- still no logical meaning there. So I'd really need to get rid of the "which" in this case -- since there's no good way to make it link up with the verb "lost" -- and rephrase to something like "Losing my passport was a disaster" (or "... was a disastrous error").

Hope that helps!