anksm22 wrote:New hardy varieties of rice show promise of producing high yields without the costly requirements of irrigation and application of commercial fertilizer by earlier high-yielding varieties.
(A) requirements of irrigation and application of commercial fertilizer by earlier high-yielding varieties
(B) requirements by earlier high-yielding varieties of application of commercial fertilizer and irrigation
(C) requirements for application of commercial fertilizer and irrigation of earlier high-yielding varieties
(D) application of commercial fertilizer and irrigation that was required by earlier high-yielding varieties
(E) irrigation and application of commercial fertilizer that were required by earlier high-yielding varieties
Please explain how to approach this question
This SC question involves more rhetorical construction issues than grammatical construction issues. Looking at the original form, you probably get what it is supposed to mean and yet the sentence is not very effective. There are not any simple grammatical issues, such as subject verb non agreement, that jump out at you, and yet the original form of the sentence is not effective and neither are those created using most of the answer choices.
Can you use simple rules to get to the answer to this one? Not really. You mostly need to look carefully at the order of and choice of words and see what is actually being conveyed, or not, by each answer choice and figure out which one is effective or at least most effective.
I really like this one. It's a great SC finding the correct answer to which mostly requires reasoning rather than rule memorization, and so anyone can hack his or her way to the right answer.
Check this out.
A) So what's costly, the
requirements of irrigation? Is the fertilizer applied
by higher yielding varieties? The words are ok in a way, and yet the order of the words makes this sentence awkward at best and nonsensical at worst.
B) In this choice the meaning is a little funny. Are the requirements really
by the higher yielding varieties? Maybe they are requirements
of higher yielding varieties. Also look at the second part of this choice. It seems to be conveying that what's being discussed are
varieties of application of commercial fertilizer and irrigation. So once again the placement of words is resulting in ambiguous meaning or nonsense.
C) The requirements are costly? Nope. The irrigation and application of fertilizer are costly. So this is out.
D) Well this one actually has a clear grammatical error.
application....and irrigation is plural and
was in the modifier describing them is singular. So there's a reason to check off this one. It's close to being ok though.
costly is now correctly modifying
application...and irrigation which are then clearly described as
required by earlier high-yielding varieties. There is a little word order issue as well.
application of could be referring to both
fertilizer and
irrigation. Does the writer really mean to convey that there is application of irrigation? Probably not.
E) In this one, where in choice D there was
was there is instead
were. So now the verb in the modifier agrees with plural
irrigation and application. Also, since
irrigation is now before
application of we know that the meaning is not application of irrigation. So this choice works. Good thing. It's the last chance.
So
E is the correct answer.
