SC - OG 28 - Please help on parallelism

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Q) Building on civilizations that preceded them in coastal Peru, the Mochica developed their own elaborate
society, based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting other wild and domestic resources.
Option:
(A) based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and
exploiting
(B) based on the cultivation of such crops as corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and seafood,
and the exploitation of
(C) and basing it on the cultivation of crops like corn and beans, harvesting fish and seafood, and the exploiting of
(D) and they based it on their cultivation of crops such as corn and beans, the harvest of fish and
seafood, and exploiting
(E) and they based it on their cultivating such crops like corn and beans, their harvest of fish and
shellfish, and they exploited


IMO it was A. I thought cultivating, harvesting and exploiting should be parallel.

OA : B

Thanks everyone for your time!

Regards,
Hiren
Source: — Sentence Correction |

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by chendawg » Tue Jun 14, 2011 8:20 am
The harvesting is not parallel to cultivating and exploiting; it is actually used as a noun. Cultivating and exploiting are participles, thus it's not parallel.

In the original sentence, it also uses "like" to introduce examples, a big no no. We must use such as.

B is the only sentence that keeps everything parallel (the cultivation, the harvesting, and the exploitation). All of these structures match (all nouns), even though exploitation doesn't end in -ing. Matching structures is the fool-proof way of looking @ parallelism, instead of matching endings of words, as sometimes they don't match.
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