Our understanding was that she would continue to cover the costs of sc

Alright! We've got some great discussion going here! Glad we took the bait!

Here's the thing about noun modifiers. As much as we say that a noun modifier must touch the noun it is modifying, there is an exception to this rule. For example:

"The work of art, which is hanging on the wall, was painted by Picasso." --> Here, "which is hanging on the wall" correctly modifies the "work."

How is that possible?

The phrase "of art" is a prepositional phrase that also modifies the "work." Prepositional phrases can stand between nouns and their modifiers.

Other examples:

"The team of twelve, which had come in first place last year, sulked at the defeat."
"The time of day, which can be discerned using a sun dial, is based on the rotation of the Earth."

If we go back to the example above, we see that "of school enrollment and room and board for the children" is all modifying the "costs" and thus the ",which..." modifier is acceptable.

I know scheol knows the answer, and it looks like praveenism is onto something. How can we then rule out other answers?

@ puneetpratik: By "start off with the most straight-forward grammatical split" I mean that if there are modifier issues, pronoun issues, concision issues, and subject-verb issues in a given SC problem, you should start off with the one that is the most clear. For most people, that would be subject-verb agreement. We each need to know where we feel most comfortable.

B. which she agreed verbally with the rest of the family to pay. IMO, here, she agreed with her family. Wrong.

C. of which she agreed verbally with the rest of the family to pay. “OF” is incorrect, and again, she agrees with the family. Wrong

D. both of which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family. I think “which” should cover the word “costs”, not each individually.

E. both of which she agreed to pay with the rest of the family verbally. Same as D.

Great Question, I simply sticked out A and B because of "Which" as a knee jerk reaction. Will keep this thing in mind Thanks @ Brett !!!

About difference between option A and B, I believe it goes as follows :
A. which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family.
B. which she agreed verbally with the rest of the family to pay.
In Option A, it appears as if she were paying not by money but by "rest of family" !!

This sentence requires the correct placement of the adverb verbally, indicating the way in which the agreement was made, and the correct use of phrases indicating with whom (the rest of the family) the agreement was made.

A. The phrase with the rest of the family is misplaced, making it sound as if the subject of the sentence and the rest of the family were planning to pay the fees together.
B. The adverb verbally comes immediately after the verb agreed, indicating their correlation, and the placement of the phrase with the rest of the family makes it clear that the agreement was between the two parties.
C. The word of is unnecessary and confusing.
D. The phrase with the rest of the family is misplaced, making it sound as if the subject of the sentence and the family were planning to pay the fees together; also the word both is unnecessary and confusing.
E. Verbally is misplaced, making it sound as if the promised payments will be made by speaking.
The correct answer is B.

Our understanding was that she would continue to cover the costs of school enrollment and room and board for the children, which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family.


A. which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family.
B. which she agreed verbally with the rest of the family to pay.
C. of which she agreed verbally with the rest of the family to pay.
D. both of which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family.
E. both of which she agreed to pay with the rest of the family verbally.

My initial choice was to eliminate any A & D because the phrase "to pay with the rest of the family." makes it appear as if she is using her family as the monetary exchange to pay. I eliminated E because of the same reason only it's a verbal payment?

The decision between B & C was a bit tougher but because she was covering 2 things (school enrollment and room and board), of which sounded like it was addressing a single item rather than multiple; and thus this leaves B.

I'm pretty terrible at SCs so I was giddy to get this right.. I think.

Both of the boldfaced clauses are dependent. An independent clause has to be able to stand alone as a sentence, but a clause starting with "which," "of which," or "both of which" is modifying something else, so it can't stand alone.

A) Our understanding was that she would continue to cover the costs of school enrollment and room and board for the children, both of which she verbally agreed with the rest of the family to pay.

In this sentence, we have a little ambiguity. The phrase "both of which" introduces a noun modifier, but are we modifying costs or children? Normally, a noun modifier modifies the immediately preceding noun, so we'd say it is modifying "children" (clearly not the intent). On the other hand, since "for the children" is itself a modifier, we might say that we are modifying the whole thing--"costs of school enrollment and room and board for the children." One way we might clarify this would be to reintroduce the noun "costs":

Our understanding was that she would continue to cover the costs of school enrollment and room and board for the children--costs that she had verbally agreed with the rest of the family to pay.
(See GMAT Verbal Review 2nd ed., SC #95, for a similar use of the long dash and reintroduction of the subject to provide clarity.)

If we want to use an independent clause, it would be something like this:
Our understanding was that she would continue to cover the costs of school enrollment and room and board for the children; these were costs that she had verbally agreed with the rest of the family to pay.

B) Our understanding was that she would continue to cover the costs of school enrollment and room and board for the children, of which she verbally agreed with the rest of the family to pay.

Here, the use of "of which" is incorrect. "Of which" generally indicates that we are talking about a portion--we certainly can't be talking about a portion of the children, and the sentence doesn't go on to identify a portion of the costs. Here is a correct sentence using "of which":

We sent her a bill for $150,000, of which a third went to pay for the children's school enrollment and room and board.

Again, the second clause is dependent, as it modifies $150,000.

I hope this helps!

From the standpoint of finding the correct answer, we work by eliminating wrong answer choices to determine what is left. Since we are forced to keep some verison of "which" in all the answer choices we have to look elsewhere. There is an error with the placement of the modifier "with the rest of the family" and answer choices A, D, and E have an ambiguous meaning about agreeing to pay with the family (did they agree with the family or pay with the family or agree to pay with the family). B & C clearly state that the agreement (to pay) was made with the rest of the family. The difference in B & C is between "which" and "of which". "Of which" is typically used to indentify parts of the group and usually includes an additional word like we see in choices D & E ("BOTH of which"). That leaves us with answer choice B.

Now to the question about using the modifier "which" to refer to the costs of enrollment and room and board. There are exceptions that allow us to skip over a noun to get to the noun we want to modify, but the exceptions don't come up much and they are typically short phrases (Picasso's works of art - you could skip over art). Here the sentence really wants us to skip all the way back to "costs" and ignore a pretty massive space between "which" and "costs" (the noun being modified). I do not believe you would ever see the GMAT use a construction like this.

KW

KyleWiddison, thanks for weighing in here. Wanted to check with you, how did you decide that the meaning conveyed in option B was the originally intended meaning.

The meaning conveyed in choice B is unambiguous (she agreed with the rest of the family that she would pay). In the other options you don't know if she agreed with the rest of the family that she would pay or if she agreed that she would pay along with the rest of the family. In matters of meaning, we can't always know the original intent, so you have to use a process of eliminating choices that have problems like unclear, illogical, or ambiguous meaning.

KW

Our understanding was that she would continue to cover the costs of school enrollment and room and board for the children, which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family.

a) which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family.

b) which she agreed verbally with the rest of the family to pay.

c) of which she agreed verbally with the rest of the family to pay.

d) both of which she verbally agreed to pay with the rest of the family.

e) both of which she agreed to pay with the rest of the family verbally.

Source : GMATClub Tests

Dear Mike,

The OA for this question is B, but "to pay"at the end of the option was why I did not pick it as the right answer. Had picked A instead. However, after reading the explanation, I understand that "verbally" should follow "agreed" and "agreed" should be followed by "with the rest of the family". I am still confused about "to pay". Is this a usual way of sentence formation, since I have never come across such sentences in normal usage..
What concept is tested here??

Thanking you in anticipation.
Regards
Soumya

Dear Soumya,
I'm happy to respond.

I don't know who wrote this question, but it is an absolutely horrible SC question. Don't assume that any question you find for free is going to be a good question. Are you aware of the sarcastic phrase: "free ... and worth every penny"? The subject matter of this question is very casual and interpersonal -- this does not reflect the formal academic feel of the real GMAT. The splits are ridiculous. There is no rule that "verbally agreed" or "agreed verbally" is correct, and that sort of thing would NEVER be tested on the real GMAT. It appears that the person who wrote this question had absolutely no idea about the lofty standards of the GMAT SC. I were going to grade this question, I would give it an F.

Spending time thinking about this question and its explanation will not help you. I would recommend signing up for Magoosh, so you have access to high quality questions and explanations.

Mike

Dear Mike,

As always, thank you for the feedback! Would beware while accessing questions... and thank you for the recommendation about the sign up for Magoosh,will definitely give it a thought!
Warm regards
Soumya

Can someone tell me if the OA is A or B?
I find some posts saying A, some saying B.

But if it's B, then wouldn't it be a deviation from the statement given?

In my first post I explain the problem of meaning in option A where the agreement becomes unclear. Did she agree to pay the costs along with the family (the family pays too)? Or, did she agree with the family that she alone would cover the costs? The original sentence has unclear meaning. Changing the position of the modifier in B fixes that ambiguity.

What do you mean when you say "wouldn't it be a deviation from the statement given"?

KW

Dear asfandabid,

I'm happy to respond.

Here's what I'll say. Every quant question I have seen from the GMAT Club tests has been superb. I think there are two reasons for this. First of all, it's relatively easy to write good GMAT quant practice questions--as long as the question is unambiguous, has just one right answer, and is not 100% obvious in what it's asking, then it's a reasonably good quant question. More importantly, the genius Bunuel has vetted everything on the quant side.

On the verbal side, it's a different story. First of all, it's much much harder to write high quality GMAT verbal practice questions. For example, this question flawlessly fits the general format of SC and it ostensibly tests the kinds of things that GMAT SC tests, but it falls short in a number of ways. More than 50% of the SC practices questions I see from private companies are very poor. The official verbal questions are uniformly superb. MGMAT and Magoosh have very good questions, and I have great respect for Veritas' questions as well. The quality varies with some others. Similarly, with the GMAT Club test, there is high variability in the quality of the verbal questions--some are superb, some are so-so, and some are not good. Furthermore, there's no "verbal Bunuel." In fact, it's not even clear to me what kind of one-in-a-million expertise someone would have to have so that person could do for verbal what Bunuel does for math.

So, no, I certainly would not presume to give any kind of grade to the entire collection. Among other things, I haven't gone through all the questions. The most I am willing to give is my opinion on individual questions in isolation, and that's what I have given here.

Does all this make sense?
Mike

It is A good question testing modifier. It's not GMAT like ..in all the answer choices there is no antecedent for She.

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