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SC - Complex gerund(Manhattan Flash Card Doubt)

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SC - Complex gerund(Manhattan Flash Card Doubt)

by goelmohit2002 » Sun Oct 04, 2009 12:03 pm
Hi All,

In the Manhattan SC flash cards available at:

https://www.manhattangmat.com/pdf/FlashC ... e_2009.pdf

page#96....

the sentence given is
"Alexander the Great remarked that conquering foreign states couldn't compare
to the vanquishing of his enemies at home.."

Flash cards say the above is wrong....because "This question is about parallelism. Two items being compared to one another must be parallel. "Conquering," a
simple gerund, cannot be made parallel to "the vanquishing of," a complex gerund."

The same is corrected as

"Alexander the Great remarked that conquering foreign states couldn't compare to vanquishing his enemies at home."

Can someone please tell what does Manhattan meant to say here ?
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by scoobydooby » Mon Oct 05, 2009 2:59 am
"conquering" is parallel to "vanquishing" not "the vanquishing of"
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by goelmohit2002 » Mon Oct 05, 2009 4:12 am
scoobydooby wrote:"conquering" is parallel to "vanquishing" not "the vanquishing of"
Hi Scooby,

Thanks. What you say looks correct....

But can you please tell what does Manhattan mean to say in the above explanation ?
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by scoobydooby » Mon Oct 05, 2009 4:17 am
says for parallelism, both sides must be parallel in form and logic.

"conquering"(simple gerund) is not parallel in form to "the vanquishing of" (complex gerund)
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by maihuna » Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:51 am
scoobydooby wrote:says for parallelism, both sides must be parallel in form and logic.

"conquering"(simple gerund) is not parallel in form to "the vanquishing of" (complex gerund)
What is complex Gerund? This is why I emphasize going through basic grammar book, A Gerund is a noun verb, though the use of Gerund as noun is some time clear, like:
Playing football makes me strong.

Sometime when the use of Present Participle(ing+) as noun is not clear the is used, so "the splitting apart of continents" emphasize that "splitting is used as a noun, while only splitting can be considered participle particularly when compared with other explicit nouns in a parallel sentence having sevral clauses.

To repeat, use of noun is restricted to Subject of a sentence/Object of a verb/ Appositives only.
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Re: SC - Complex gerund(Manhattan Flash Card Doubt)

by lunarpower » Fri Oct 09, 2009 1:40 am
goelmohit2002 wrote:Can someone please tell what does Manhattan meant to say here ?
i will confess that i actually have no idea what a "simple gerund" is, vis-à-vis a "complex gerund".

but the parallelism issue here is fairly simple: "VERBing OBJ" is not parallel to "the VERBing of OBJ".
this is the only thing you have to get from this flash card. everything else - especially the linguistic terms - is just noise. don't get distracted. (since you will never have to name these things on the exam, don't sweat too hard over their names.)

the best part is that you won't even have to be able to pick these things out of nowhere - remember that you'll have ANSWER CHOICES (SPLITS) to help you out.
if the non-underlined part contains "VERBing OBJ" as the first part of a parallel structure, and the underlined part contains a split between "VERBing OBJ" and "the VERBing of OBJ", then your decision should be pretty clear.
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