Hey, varundaga05:

Good question - this one looks to be a fairly tough one.

With B, consider the events being listed:

...who receives acclaim
...whose reputation declines
...never regains its status

For those three things to be listed in a row, they would need to be in parallel form, as they compose a list of which the first two items are parallel. So, for one thing, the third item would need to have a modifier (like "who" or "whose") to be parallel.

Perhaps just as egregiously, choice B by not having a modifier there leaves the operators of "never regains its status" without a clear reference. Is it the composer, or is it the reputation?

Choice C, by introducing the word "but" to set up an independent clause, clears that up and avoids the lack-of-parallelism error by breaking the list into two clauses. Here, it is clear that the reputation loses its status (meaning that "its" is a proper pronoun; "its" couldn't describe "composer", so that's another ambiguity flaw with B), and because there is only one subject ("reputation"), the two verbs are parallel ("declines" and "regains").

Choice B's other flaw - the uses of "regains" and "again" - is that it uses redundant terms. The prefix "re-" means "again", so having both of those terms there just adds an unnecessary word to the sentence. The GMAT has expressed a clear preference for Brevity whenever possible, so if you're between two answers and can't find another difference, you should tend toward the shorter sentence.




One last note on the "regain...again" flaw, that's more for entertainment value than anything else, but may help to sell the point to some. Does anyone remember the song "Whoomp, There It Is" from back in the mid-90s? Quite a few of us at Veritas Prep headquarters are hip-hop music fans, and love to break down the GMAT-style logic and grammar of hip-hop when we can (we had a Hip-Hop Month in the GMAT tips section of our blog in March). Well, in that song, the opening line uttered by the one-hit wonder group "Tag Team" is:

"Tag Team, back again, check it to wreck it now let's begin..."

I've always been delightfully tickled by the ridiculous nature of those lyrics, given that Tag Team was a brand new band to the popular scene, and wouldn't be back...that was a flash in the pan. But if you take the lyrics, you have:

Tag Team...
Back (meaning that they had already been here before)
Again... (meaning that this was the SECOND time they were returning, which is ludicrous)

Tag Team would have failed GMAT Sentence Correction (okay by them...they made a fortune off that one song), and I've always found that example to be a great one at pointing out redundant terms.

Choice C, by introducing the word "but" to set up an independent clause, clears that up and avoids the lack-of-parallelism error by breaking the list into two clauses. Here, it is clear that the reputation loses its status (meaning that "its" is a proper pronoun; "its" couldn't describe "composer", so that's another ambiguity flaw with B), and because there is only one subject ("reputation"), the two verbs are parallel ("declines" and "regains").

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the explanation. It will be great if you can clarify the following:

We say that the use of 'but' in option C sets up an independent clause (IC), but is 'whose reputation declines after death and never regains its former status' an independent clause? Can we start an IC with a possessive relative pronoun 'whose' ?

Thanks

Hey, samarpan:

Good call, and thanks for pointing that out. "...but whose reputation..." isn't an "independent" clause, because "whose" needs to refer back to "composers", so it isn't truly independent. I guess you'd call that a dependent clause, but the important thing for this sentence is that it is its own clause with a unique subject ("reputation") and verb ("regains"), so it forms a proper sentence.

Thanks for adding clarity!

can anyone plz tell me .... what is the final answer ??

gulrohit wrote:can anyone plz tell me .... what is the final answer ??

C

gulrohit wrote:can anyone plz tell me .... what is the final answer ??

C