madzstar wrote:
Managing your irrigation system well and watering your grass wisely not only saves water, but helps to ensure the success of your lawn.
A. saves water, but helps to ensure the success of your lawn.
B. saves water, but also help to ensure the success of your lawn
C. saves water, but the success of your lawn is more helpfully ensured
D. save water, but also help to ensure the success of your lawn
E. save water, but also the success of your lawn is more helpfully ensured
The answer here is just APPAULING!
OK, let me see if I can explain this for you. There are a few key issues at play on this question. First you have the "not only..., but also" phrasing. When you use "not only" you need "but also" to complete the phrase, so A & C are eliminated.
Second you have to determine the proper Subject/Verb agreement (the saves/save split at the beginning). Your subject is the combination of noun phrases - "Managing your irrigation system well" (one 'thing') and "watering your grass wisely" (another 'thing'). The word 'and' is very powerful and it creates a compound, or plural, subject. The plural subject requires the plural form of the verb, so we want 'save' (no 's' on the plural form of the verb) - eliminate B.
We're left with D & E, and here comes parallelism to finish it off. When we say 'not only SAVE water', we are going to need a verb (HELP) after 'but also' to maintain parallelism - eliminate E. That leaves us with answer choice D.
Does this help? Do you have other questions?
KW