honchos wrote:
Many house builders offer rent-to-buy
programs that enable a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to be able to move into new housing and to apply part of the rent to a purchase later.
(A) programs that enable a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to be able to move into new housing and to apply
(B) programs that enable a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to move into new housing and to apply
(C)programs; that enables a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to move into new housing, to apply
(D) programs, which enables a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to move into new housing, applying
(E) programs, which enable a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to be able to move into new housing, applying
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This is Question # 55 from
Official Guide 13th Edition.
I was able to solve this question, but I have a specific question.
This is the Official Explanation -
https://screencast.com/t/4Y0IHxCGMJoOE in option E says comma after program is incorrect because the clause is meant to be restrictive.
So what should we conclude ? If we remove the comma just like this -
(E) programs which enable a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to be able to move into new housing, applying
would this become restrictive now?
But I think which requires comma before it.
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I have more issue in what they have explained in Option D - applying following a Non restrictive clause suggests that the builders not the family, are applying for the rent. what should I take away from this explanation?
Dear
honchos,
I'm happy to respond.
My intelligent friend, remember the paradox of the
GMAT OG. The questions are among the finest test prep questions in the entire world. The OE for the questions, by contrast, range from OK to abysmal. In many cases, as here, they opt for brevity rather than clarity in the OE.
Here's what I think they were trying to say. In the prompt version, we get
...
rent-to-buy programs that enable ...
We don't need to know anything about the nature of rent-to-by programs and the different kinds of them. For whatever reason, the meaning of the sentence, as expressed in the prompt, requires the restrictive clause, a.k.a. the vital noun modifier. That's what the prompt gives.
Choice (E) changes this to a non-vital, non-restrictive modifier with a comma & a "
which." This changes the meaning, because the original sentence expressed the ideas in terms of a vital noun modifier. There, both the comma & the "
which," which are both indicative of a non-restrictive situation, are wrong.
You are right. On the GMAT:
[comma] + "which" always go together and always indicate the non-restrictive, non-vital case
[no comma] + "that" always go together and always indicate the
vital and
restrictive case.
The OE, in its extreme brevity, was not very precise. The problem is
not simply the comma, as if removing the comma and leaving everything else unchanged would produce a perfect sentence! Instead, the comma, like the word "
which," is indicative of a non-restrictive case, which changes the meaning from the prompt. We need the restrictive case.
As for the participle "
applying"----suppose we have the structure
[subject][verb][direct object][noun modifying clause for direct object],[participle]In many cases, that participle is meant to target the subject of the sentence or the action of the clause as a whole. Participles often reach over intervening words and point back to the subject. It's not 100% clear that this is happening in choices (D) & (E), but the fact that this reading is even a possibility introduces ambiguity, which is never good in a SC sentence. --- Perhaps another way to say this is: the prompt sentence makes clear that these programs enables families to take two actions, and it puts those actions in parallel as two infinitive phrases. Having the two actions in parallel is logical, because they both have the same actor and the same relationship to that actor. Choices (D) & (E) break this parallelism and choose an alternative structure for no particularly good reason. Now, toss in that this new alternative structure is also ambiguous. That's a lose-lose proposition. That's the problem with "
applying" in (D) & (E).
My friend, even though the questions in the
OG are pure gold, the OEs are often less than perfect and sometimes, as in this case, completely misleading because of their hyper-brevity. Do not put much trust in the
OG explanations: they simply don't deserve the same level of respect that the questions deserve. You would be better off coming here to GC and getting the thorough explanations of the experts here.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
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Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)