Stymieing the Armadas plans to meet up with the Duke of

Hi all,

This is the sentence with choice C:

Choice C: The defeat of the Spanish Armada, which stymied the Armada’s plans to meet up with the Duke of Parma’s army off the coast of Flanders in the Spanish Netherlands, was not only due to gale winds that favored the British but also due to the sacrificing of eight war ships as “fireships,” vessels filled with pitch, brimstone, gunpowder, and tar and sent downwind toward the closely-anchored Spanish fleet.

There is no problem with the modification of “which” in this choice. It does not make sense for “which” to modify the immediate preceding noun “the Spanish Armada”. Also notice that this noun cannot be placed anywhere else in the sentence without violating the meaning of the sentence. So “which” can very well jump over “of the Spanish Armada” and can correctly modify “The defeat”.

The link posted in my above post contains a deatil article on the same topic. It deals with when “which” or any other noun modifier can jump over entities to make logical modification and when it cannot. Solve this question from GMAT Prep for the similar use of the logical modification by a noun modifier:

From studies of the bony house of the brain, which is the cranium, located in the back of the skull, come what scientists know about dinosaur brains.

(A) From studies of the bony house of the brain, which is the cranium, located in the back of the skull, come what scientists know about dinosaur brains.
(B) The knowledge that scientists know about dinosaur brains comes from studies of the bony house of the brain, located in the back of the skull, that is, the cranium.
(C) The knowledge of dinosaur brains that scientists have come from studies of the bony house of the brain, which is located in the back of the skull and is called the cranium.
(D) What scientists know about dinosaur brains comes from studies of the cranium, the bony house of the brain located in the back of the skull.
(E) Located in the back of the skull is the cranium, the bony house of the brain, and it is from studies of this that scientists know what they know about dinosaur brains.

Now let’s get back to this question. The issue with Choice C is the use of “sacrificing” is not correct. We need an entity that must be parallel to “gale winds”, a noun entity. Now “sacrificing” is also a nou in that it is a gerund. However, when a sentence requires the usage of the noun form of a word, we must use the main noun form of the word and not the “ing” noun form. Hence, we need to use “the sacrifice” here instead of “the sacrificing”.

Hope this helps.
Thnaks.
Shraddha