WorthPursuit wrote:
Hi.
I don't know if anyone is still on this post but if you are, can you explain to me the parallelism in the question. It says, "controlled small -scale burning, forest thinning, and the training of fire-management personnel." "the training of fire-management personnel," seems incorrect to me because it is the only part of the list that begins with "the."
Is the sentence still parallel adding words to it at the beginning or does it only matter that all these words have a verb with "-ing." In other sentences, I have the feeling that most words are parallel from the beginning.
Advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Don't worry: GMAT Club posts live forever.
Your question about parallelism is a darned good one, and the answer is actually a little bit complicated. I think there are two things that are key here: first, parallelism isn't a purely rigid, mechanical thing. You need sentences to be parallel ENOUGH to convey the intended meaning accurately, but there's more wiggle-room than we like to think sometimes.
And the second thing is that the same structure appears in all five answer choices, so the GMAT is openly begging you not to worry about it in this particular case.
But back to the first thing. Consider these two sentences:
- I ate eggs and ham last week. -- This is the most boring parallelism I could think of: "I ate (noun) and (noun)..." Fine, right?
- I ate eggs and green ham last week. -- If you're too mechanical with the parallelism, you might think that this is wrong: "I ate (noun) and (adjective noun)..." But the essence is still fine: I ate two foods. Those foods are parallel. So it's not a problem.
The same general concept applies to the
OG question above. In the phrase "controlled small-scale burning, forest thinning, and the training of fire-management personnel", we still have three gerunds (
nouns ending in "-ing") as the heart of the parallel list. Personally, I agree with you: this would probably be nicer if it said "training fire-management personnel", but I don't think it's a horrible thing to stick the article in there in this case. The essence of the list is still intact -- and we don't have any other options, anyway.
But you're smart to notice this sort of thing: sometimes, the GMAT does seem to prefer lists that have articles attached to all three nouns if there's a compelling reason to include them. Here's an example that you might find interesting:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/building-on- ... 30798.html.
I hope this helps, and welcome to GMAT Club!