technically, this is an incorrect analysis, since what you've labeled as IC2 is not actually an independent clause.Jai_itguys wrote:Until the passage of the Piracy and Counterfeiting Amendments Act in 1982, a first-time charge of copyright infringement was merely a misdemeanor charge, federal prosecutors being unlikely in pursuing criminal copyright infringers, while offenders were subject to relatively small penalties.
IMO this is a problem of run on sentence. A run on sentence occurs when 2 independent clauses(IC) are not joined appropriately.
IC1: Until the passage of the Piracy and Counterfeiting Amendments Act in 1982, a first-time charge of copyright infringement was merely a misdemeanor charge, (Actually this is a dependent clause + Independent clause but relative to 2nd part of the sentance you can practically treat it as an IC)
IC2: federal prosecutors being unlikely in pursuing criminal copyright infringers, while offenders were subject to relatively small penalties.
Rule to join IC: Independent clauses may be joined by a [comma and a conjunction (and,but,or etc)], or by a semicolon, or by a dash.
The choices A,B,C are out straight away as they violate rule 1-joined by a [comma and a conjunction (and,but,or etc)]. Now we are left with choices D and E. If you choose option D the last part of the sentance will become "and offenders being subject to relatively small penalties" which is a sentence fragment. Remember 'being' in 'offenders being' is not acting as a verb. the -ing form of the verb always require a helping verb. The correct answer is 'E'.
Guru's, Please let me know if my analysis is wrong.
the crux of the matter is that -ING forms are NOT VERBS; in order to consider "IC2" a clause, you'd have to regard "being" as a verb (which it isn't).
... so they are ATTEMPTING to construct a sentence with the following format:
until xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (subordinate clause = modifier)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (MAIN CLAUSE)
comma + noun VERBing xxxxxxxxxxxx (= modifier; this specific type of modifier is known as an "absolute phrase")
while xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (subordinate clause = modifier)
that's actually a completely valid sentence construction, if it's done correctly. here's an example of a well-constructed sentence that has this construction:
until Mom came in and told us to share the food, my brother kept hogging it all for himself, his dirty hands plunging into all the plates, while i just looked at the scene in disgust.
--
there are still at least 2 glaring errors in (a), though:
1 * "being unlikely in pursuing" is unidiomatic. (very, very much so -- i would guess that at least 99% of native speakers of english would reject this choice out of hand, immediately. in fact, this choice is so clearly unidiomatic, at least to the eyes of a native speaker, that i'm genuinely surprised to see it; the gmat normally tests idioms that would be challenging to both native and non-native speakers alike.)
2 * the lack of parallelism, which i mentioned in my post above.
