SC OG(chambers inside pyramid)

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SC OG(chambers inside pyramid)

by gocoder » Mon Aug 28, 2017 4:24 am
In late 1997, the chambers inside the pyramid of the Pharaoh Menkaure at Giza were closed to visitors for cleaning and repair due to moisture exhaled by tourists, which raised its humidity to such levels so that salt from the stone was crystallizing and fungus was growing on the walls.

A. due to moisture exhaled by tourists, which raised its humidity to such levels so that salt from the stone was crystallizing
B. due to moisture that tourists had exhaled, thereby raising its humidity to such levels that salt from the stone would crystallize
C. because tourists were exhaling moisture, which had raised the humidity within them to levels such that salt from the stone would crystallize
D. because of moisture that was exhaled by tourists raising the humidity within them to levels so high as to make the salt from the stone crystallize
E. because moisture exhaled by tourists had raised the humidity within them to such levels that salt from the stone was crystallizing

In E, whether there is pronoun ambiguity because them is closer to tourists than Chambers ?

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by elias.latour.apex » Tue Aug 29, 2017 11:17 am
First of all, we should notice that the initial sentence is wrong. It contains the phrase repair due to moisture, but the repair is not due to moisture. Answer choice (B) contains the same error.

Answer choices C, D, and E all contain different phrasing, but the key is that (E) contains the clause salt from the stone was crystallizing , which goes well with the words immediately after the underlined portion: and fungus was growing on the walls.

Accordingly, only answer choice (E) is parallel.
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by ErikaPrepScholar » Wed Aug 30, 2017 8:18 am
Right away, we should notice that A and B both start with "due to", while C, D, and E all start with "because of". An important rule to have memorized is that "due to" can only modify a noun, while "because of" can only modify a verb.

We want to say that the moisture exhaled by tourists had the effect that the chambers "were closed"-a verb. This means that we want to use "because of". (In fact, if we use "due to", the sentence reads that the moisture exhaled by tourists had the effect of "cleaning and repair" ... which doesn't make a lot of sense.) So we can eliminate A and B.

Scanning C, D, and E, we see that E is the shortest answer, so we should already be leaning toward that one. Looking back at our original sentence, we see that the last portion of the sentence is not underlined and that it starts with a conjunction. Whenever we see that we have a series (a list of two or more items connected by a conjunction) where part of the series is underlined and part is NOT, we should immediately start looking for parallelism issues. The last item in the series ("fungus was growing on the walls") is not underlined, so we want the underlined item to match it-so "noun past continuous verb". Looking at our options, we see that only E has the correct structure ("salt from the stone was crystallizing") and must be correct.
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