Sentence Correction

One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is remaining empathetic to the needs of patients in the face of all the rigorous training.

A. facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is remaining

B. facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is to remain

C. faced by engineering practitioners today apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, which remain

D. faced by Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, and they remain

E. facing Engineering practitioners today, is absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, and besides remaining



OA: A, I cannot distinguish between A and B and chose B

Hi,
If the sentence ends like this, remaining is better than 'to remain' because remaining(present participle) means continue to exist(progressive). The meaning is that the problems have been there and they still remain.
Compare: This is continuing
and This is to continue.

As it is right now, is this sentence complete?

i also selected B. Since, acc to me, "to remain" has a generality than does "is remaining".

THanks all. There was extra after the underlined portion, hence it is A.

I have revised the question, please take a look if you wish.

The sentence, when striped, looks like:
A: One of the greatest problems today, apart from ABSORBING and LEARNING, is REMAINING emphatic to the needs of patients...

B: One of the greatest problems today, apart from ABSORBING and LEARNING, is TO REMAIN emphatic to the needs of patients...

A (ABSORBING, LEARNING, REMAINING) looks better as the capitalized words are paralleled, much unlike B (ABSORBING, LEARNING, TO REMAIN)

Frankenstein wrote:Hi,
If the sentence ends like this, remaining is better than 'to remain' because remaining(present participle) means continue to exist(progressive). The meaning is that the problems have been there and they still remain.
Compare: This is continuing
and This is to continue.

Also facing is parallel to remaining , will this be a good reason?
As both facing and remaining here indicates the progressive nature of the verb.
What you feel?

Whats the source of this problem?

- absorbing, learning and remaining are 3 greatest problems that this question describes. So I feel under normal circumstances these should be parallel.
- But "apart from ABSORBING ...and LEARNING..." is in a non-essential phrase which is a different grammatical section/unit from the grammatical section in which "remaining" lies - the main clause.
So the real question is :
Do things in different sections MUST BE parallel or is it okay for them to be non-parallel?

Can any of the instructors help on this please?

a)one of the greatest problems is remaining empathetic to the needs of patients.......
b) one of the greatest problems is to remain empathetic to the needs of patients.....
i think b distorts the meaning also.

Haven't updated this in a while but I'd like to add that the sentence can be paraphrased to:

One of the problems facing practioners, apart from absorbing X and learning Y, is

hence, you need to make absorbing, learning, and REMAINing parallel.

Gmatdriller has it right that "remaining" is to be parallel with the two aforementioned gerunds. Please do not confuse "facing" in the parallelism.

cyrwr1 wrote:One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is remaining empathetic to the needs of patients in the face of all the rigorous training.

A. facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is remaining

B. facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is to remain

C. faced by engineering practitioners today apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, which remain

D. faced by Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, and they remain

E. facing Engineering practitioners today, is absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, and besides remaining



OA: A, I cannot distinguish between A and B and chose B

I think, if "facing" in B was "faced", then B is also correct!
Please correct me if i am wrong!

TIA,
GK

IMO , B

If you remove the stuff in between the comma's we get,
One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today is to remain empathetic to the needs of patients in the face of all the rigorous training

You cannot remove what is between the commas.

You can rethink the sentence like this:

A problem with your studies facing you today, apart from committing time and comprehending the subject, is focusing blah blah blah

"is focusing" would be preferred to "is to focus"

Do you think this case alleviates the confusion or is this example inapplicable?

The reason I suggested removing the clutter from in between the comma's is, so that it helps us identify the subject-verb clearly.

In your example, is focusing is not the verb, but a participle

In the original sentence One, which is a pronoun is the subject and the verb here is to remain

You are not getting the point of my comment.

the "apart from committing time and comprehending the subject" should be parallel to the last part because "committing abcd, comprehending asdf" , and "focusing jklm" are all problems just as absorbing,learning, and remaining zxy is to the original question.