For many revisionist historians, Christopher Columbus has come to

This question is an irritating exception to the so-called “touch rule” for noun modifiers.

We also covered this example during our YouTube live chat, so if you prefer to get your SC via video, click here. And we also discussed “that” and the “touch rule” in our recent Topic of the Week on “that.”

Full disclosure: I fell asleep at the wheel and totally missed this question the first time I saw it a few years ago. So please be smarter than I was. :D


This sounds great! “… progress that has decimated native peoples…” Yeah!

Oh, wait. That doesn’t actually make sense. It wasn’t the progress that decimated native peoples – the “devastation and enslavement in the name of progress” was the thing that decimated native peoples. Oops.

Notice that this is a plausible exception to the “touch rule”: the only things separating “that” from “devastation and enslavement” are a pair of prepositional phrases, and it would be awfully tough to separate them from “devastation and enslavement.” So sure, “that has decimated native peoples” could refer back to “devastation and enslavement.”

But there’s a new problem: “devastation and enslavement… has decimated.” Subject-verb error. Eliminate (A).


This one just doesn’t make any sense. The native peoples were decimated; the way (B) is written, it sounds like they decimated somebody else, but we don’t know who. And that doesn’t make sense. Eliminate (B).


Lots of messy issues here. It’s not ideal to use the gerunds “devastating and enslaving” when we could use the noun forms “devastation and enslavement.” That’s not necessarily an absolute rule, but it’s one strike against (C).

(Also, “in the name of progress” is repeated… but I think that’s a GMAT Club typo, and that error doesn’t appear in the actual question. Oops.)

“Which” is a problem here, too. If the phrase beginning with “which” modifies “Western Hemisphere,” then it’s illogical; if it reaches back to “native peoples of the Western Hemisphere”, then it’s still wrong, because “which” can’t modify people – only things. (C) is gone.


Basically, all of the errors in (C) are repeated in (D). So (D) is out, too.


Almost everything we said about (A) applies here too: this looks like a classic exception to the “touch rule.”

The only difference? “Has” in (A) has been changed to “have” in (E). “Devastation and enslavement… have decimated the native peoples.”

So (E) is the best answer, even if you think (A) might sound better.

And if anybody is still curious about the article "the" at the beginning of (E): I don't think it's a big deal, but adding "the" helps clarify that Columbus personifies the specific devastation and enslavement that decimated the native peoples, rather than devastation and enslavement in general. But again: that's not a major issue, and not something that should worry you too much.