Midway through the parade, the rodeo queen from New Mexico appeared—a

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/travel/in-mauis-upcountry-where-the-paniolo-roam.html

The event, the smaller of Maui’s two largest annual rodeos, was preceded by a paniolo parade through downtown Makawao, a historic ranch town surrounded by farms and pastures. Along Makawao’s antique main street, a high school band played ukuleles; two monstrously large, insectlike dune buggies were bedecked with glittering Christmas garlands; and a vintage tractor tied with candy-striped bows towed Santa and Mrs. Claus on a trailer decorated with Japanese paper lanterns. Midway through, the rodeo queen appeared — a blue sash across her chest, a tiara hugging the band of her cowboy hat; she rode in pirouettes on her white horse, waving at the crowd as if she knew each of them personally. In Makawao, a town of about 7,000 that’s the center of Maui’s close-knit Upcountry communities, she may well have.

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

This sentence correction problem uses an unusual structure to “hide the correct answer” - a common tool used by testmakers that you learned about in the Advanced Verbal lesson.

In (A), the phrase “a red sash across her chest, a crown hugging the band of her cowboy hat” is unusual because normally you would expect a conjunction between the two modifiers (here “and” so that it would read: “a red sash across her chest and a crown hugging the band of her cowboy hat”).

However, this fairly unusual rhetorical device (called asyndeton) is allowed and certainly something you have encountered in your reading over the years.

Everything else in the sentence is fine so (A) is indeed the correct answer.

However many students will eliminate it because they are not familiar with this rhetorical device.

The other four answer choices all have fatal flaws and if you use the proper strategy (“only eliminate when you are sure it is wrong” and “look for the easier decision points first”) then you will get this difficult problem correct.

For (B), the second clause following the semi-colon is clearly incorrect because “waving” is not used as a conjugated verb: “she rode in circles on her gray horse and waving at the crowd as if she knew each of them personally.” This would have to be “she rode…and waved”

For (C), the multiple semi-colons are incorrect. While you can use multiple semi-colons in a sentence to link parallel elements in a series, that is not the case in this example and the usage is incorrect.

In (D) and (E), you have a series of things that either lack any parallelism or are linked together improperly.

In (D) the “she rode” clause is inserted without any conjunction – a classic comma splice – and is also not parallel to the other structures.

In (E) there is no conjunction after “ cowboy hat,” and before “rode.” After using slash-and-burn (E) reads like this: she appeared….,rode – clearly incorrect without a conjunction.

Answer is (A).