ashutosh1617 wrote:
I understand why the answer is A but I've a small query. Can someone please shed light on it.
Why can't it be " To help surgeons plan and develop"?
Isn't this what the researchers are ultimately doing? They are helping and how they are helping: by planning and by developing
Hi ashutosh, when you say:
..To help surgeons plan and develop..- This means that ultimately
surgeons are planning and developing <something>; So, here, what you intend to depict is that researchers are using computer images to help surgeons accomplish these
two things (
plan and
develop). But this interpretation is illogical;
surgeons are not developing programs that will work for doctors and nurses.
The
intended meaning is that
computer images are being used (by researchers) to do two things:
i) help surgeons plan difficult operations and
ii) develop programs that will work for doctors and nurses
Hence,
help and
develop are
logically similar parts of the sentence. So, they must be
grammatically similar. Since
to help is in the non-underlined portion, we can't change it. Using
to develop ensures that the sentence does
not have the meaning interpretation issue wherein it could be interpreted as if the
surgeons are accomplishing these two things.
Reiterating, if we omit the to with develop, the sentence would be:
..to help surgeons plan and develop... The
grammatical similarity between plan and develop would convey the meaning that
surgeons are doing these two things; not the intended meaning (after all,
surgeons are supposed to just plan/perform
operations ).
p.s. This
interplay between
grammatical similarity and
logical meaning is the crux of
parallelism. Our book
EducationAisle Sentence Correction Nirvana discusses
this concept of parallelism, its application and examples in significant detail. If someone is interested, PM me your email-id, I can mail the corresponding section.
_________________
Ashish
MBA-ISB Hyderabad, GMAT-99th percentile
www.EducationAisle.com