Payal,
Thanks for the clarification and awesome breakdown. Regarding your examples about pronoun. Does it matter if the two clauses are dependent/independent clause? I'm still trying to reconcile what you said to this example below. Can you please show me the difference?
1) After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire and then searched for a tree to hang it from.
The OA suggest that: deer, fire, and tree are all in contention to be "it." Here, after roasting the deer is a dependent clause but deer is still eligible to be the antecedent. So, I guess dependent/independent clause matters?
[I guess this problem is similar to one of the problem in the set inwhich one of the clause is embedded into another clause]
[quote="e-GMAT"]Lets begin by understanding the meaning of the sentence:
This sentence lists out James Brown's recommendation for how the value of baseball player should be calculated. He says that it should not be calculated by any of these factors:
1: number of homeruns
2: pitching speed
3: general athleticism
It should be calculated by any of these:
1: number of runs created
2: slugging average
A key thing to note in this sentence is the use of "or" in the list of factors. For example in the second list, he implies that value should be calculated either by number of runs created or by slugging average.
Note that if for list 2, you replaced or with and, then the meaning will change to:
value should be calculated by number of runs created and by slugging average - so a combination of both factors.
Now before I proceed to address the specific doubts in this question, let me mention that the non-underlined portion of this sentence has an error. All the choices are actually written based on the "should-be" version of non-underlined portion of the sentence:
As-is: value of a baseball player [color=red]not be calculated[/color] by
Should-be: value of a baseball player [color=green][b]be calculated not[/b][/color] by
(@winnerhere is absolutely correct in saying that this question tests the usage of not x but y idiom).
Now continuing with the error analysis (we will split the sentence into its clauses)
(Note that I will focus only on the errors that pertain to the doubts posted by the posters here)
1: In 1980, James Brown in his book Baseball Abstract recommended
2: that the value of a baseball player be calculated not by the number of home runs, pitching speed, or general athleticism demonstrated on the field but calculated by the number of runs created or his slugging average.
SV Analysis:
Clause 1 SV Pair = James Brown - Recommended
Clase 2 SV Pair = Value - be calculated
@yellowwho, you mentioned that subject cannot reside in a prepositional phrase. That is absolutely correct (barring a few exceptions!!) But in this case neither of subjects lie in the prepositional phrase, so I am not sure what you mean by this doubt. Please elaborate so that I can clarify.
Pronoun Analysis:
There are two instances of "His' in this sentence:
1: 'his' in Clause 1 correctly refers to "James Brown".
2: Now to determine the antecedent of pronoun in clause 2, you will first look for a possible antecedent in clause 2 itself. As you see "baseball player" is the possible antecedent and indeed is the logical antecedent. And hence "his" in clause 2 refers to "baseball player".
@yellowho: Usage of his is absolutely correct here since the antecedent for 'his' in second clause appears correctly before the occurrence of second "his".
Lets consider a simpler sentence:
Tom likes his job, but James does not like his job.
In this case we have two clauses
1: Tom likes his job
2: But James does not like his job
We have two occurrences of "his". In Clause 1, his refers to Tom, and in clause2, his refers to James.
Now if you are thinking that a pronoun cannot refer to a noun in a prepositional phrase, then you are not correct. Please be sure to note that the rule of subject not lying in a prepositional phrase IS CORRECT. But many a times, people extend this rule to pronoun reference as well and think that antecedent cannot like in a prepositional phrase. There is no such rule. It is absolutely fine for a pronoun to refer to an antecedent in a prepositional phrase.
Idiom Analysis:
The sentence uses the following idiom structure
be calculated not [u]by X[/u] but [u]calculated by Y[/u]
This is incorrect. The correct structure should be:
Not by X but by Y.
This is corrected in Choice B - the correct choice.
I will not go through detailed POE, but only mention about Choice D since people have raised concerns regarding that choice. Choice D is not correct since it changes the intended meaning of the sentence. (as explained above in the meaning analysis) But note that it is grammatically correct. So you need to pay attention to the meaning of the original sentence. Even thought choice D is grammatically correct, it is not the correct choice because of the presence of "and" instead of "or" as intended in the original choice. Thus, it is very very very important to understand what the author is trying to communicate through the original sentence.
Let me know if you have any other doubts:
One last thing that I would like to mention is that we do not encourage posting e-GMAT questions in public forums. This is because we intend to keep our course content fresh for our users. However, we do understand that our users may have questions and doubts, and for this reason each concept in e-GMAT has a separate forum through which users can post any doubts that they have pertaining to our content. This way our users can see what doubts other e-gmat users have raised. Another great benefit of posting doubts on e-gmat internal forums is the speed of response. We respond to all queries within 24 hours. Actually, our average response time is less than 12 hours. So your questions really get answered almost right away.
Thanks,
Payal[/quote]
each can imply thousand things
