Sentence Correction

Dark Chocolate has been know to have great health benefits; in addition to its possibilities for lowering blood pressure, the ingredients of dark chocolate may also help it to serve as an anti-depressant.


A)in addition to its possibilities for lowering
B)in addition to its possibilities to lower
C)besides the possibility that it lowers
D)besides the possible lowering of
E)besides possibly lowering

OA E. Is this choice not awkward?

I was before confused with B and C. Then I chose B. As this choice maintain parallelism while C not.

answer should be E

Explanation below


Dark Chocolate has been know to have great health benefits; in addition to its possibilities for lowering blood pressure, the ingredients of dark chocolate may also help it to serve as an anti-depressant.


A)in addition to its possibilities for lowering
>>

1) "its" refers to the subject of the sentence after ";"
Subject of the sentence is "the ingredients". So, we have a pronoun disagreement.

2) "possibility to" > "possibility for"

B)in addition to its possibilities to lower
>> the same as A.1)

C)besides the possibility that it lowers
>> 1) the same as A.1), "it" is unclear

D)besides the possible lowering of
>> This one is difficult. I could be wrong in terms of linguistic terminology .

Without "the", "lowering" could be either gerund ("nouny" or "verby") or participle I.

The difference between nouny gerund and verby gerund is in the fact that "nouny gerund" is modified by adjectives and can be used with article "the" while "verby gerund" is modified by an adverb and should not be used with articles.

With "the", "lowering" becomes "nouny gerund" with an adjective modifier "possible".
Technically, it could be correct.

However, the goal of the author is to make the first part of the sentence to be parallel with the the second part "may also help". Thus, we should have an action which is modified by adverb. The only possible option for this is to have verby gerund + adverb.

I am not completely clear in terms of linguistic terminology. Surfing the Internet, I found several approaches for dividing "gerund" into two groups: "nouny" vs "verby", "nominal gerunds or determiner gerunds vs sentential, also called VP gerundives or NP gerunds", "verbal" vs "non-verbal". But what I would like to point out is the difference which I see.

Example:
Fencing is fun. (verbal - an activity; replaceable by the infinitive "to fence")

The white fencing contributes to the neighborhood character (deverbal - a common noun, replaceable by other nouns like "bench")

E)besides possibly lowering
>> Again I am not completely sure in terms of grammar terms.

Here "lowering" is actually "verbal" or "verby gerund" or "sentential gerundive", so it should be modified by adverb.

This is a correct approach. So, it is our answer.

duplicate

Hey Soumita,

I love your question here:

OA E. Is this choice not awkward?

That's a *huge* part of the Sentence Correction "game". We call it "hiding the right answer" - the GMAT authors are great about picking (correct) sentence structures that you or I wouldn't likely think to employ ourselves or that we may not be used to reading, and they hide the right answers to hard questions behind those.

Your strategy, though, is to get rid of fatally flawed answers. Choices A, B, and C have the same fatal flaw - the pronoun "its" or "it" in a modifying phrase for the plural "the ingredients". And choice D isn't parallel - the portion after the underline says "the ingredients may also help..." so you need a verb (lowering, in E) to show that there is a first possible action.

Most importantly here, let's go back to your question. E can certainly be seen as awkward, but you can't fully rule it out as *wrong*, and since it's the only one without a fatal flaw it has to be the correct answer. Sentence Correction is largely a process-of-elimination exercise - you should eliminate the definite errors first, and you can become extremely good at rooting out:

-Pronoun errors
-Subject-verb agreement errors
-Modifier errors
-Comparison errors
-etc.

Then, go back and try to choose between any remaining answers at a more nuanced level. But the GMAT knows that a lot of us like to use our ears or flex our muscles with how much we know about obscure grammar rules, so it either "sells the wrong answer" (by packaging it in a structure we've come to like) or "hides the right answer" (by putting it in a sentence structure that a lot of us find awkward and might therefore eliminate, even though it's correct). Watch out for this misdirection - it's everywhere as problems get tougher.