yatindra20 wrote:
Please help in this Difficult question GMATNINJA
Plenty of nice juicy errors in this one...
Quote:
(A) Dinosaur tracks show them walking with their feet directly under their bodies, like mammals and birds, not extended out to the side in the manner of modern reptiles.
The first thing I notice is "them," which has to refer to a plural noun, but there's no plural noun that works here. "Tracks?" Nope. The dinosaur tracks don't show "tracks" walking. A pronoun can be ambiguous, but it cannot be incoherent. So (A) is out.
Quote:
(B) Dinosaur tracks show that they walked with their feet directly under their bodies, as do mammals and birds, not extended out to the side in the manner of modern reptiles.
Same problem as (A), but with "they" instead of "them."
Quote:
(C) Dinosaurs left tracks that showed them walking with their feet directly under their bodies, like mammals and birds, not extended out to the side in the manner of modern reptiles.
This one fixes the pronoun issue - "them" can refer to "dinosaurs," but now we've got a meaning problem. This version makes it sound as though the tracks literally showed dinosaurs walking, the way, say, a video might show a toddler walking. That would be neat, but it's not terribly logical. The tracks give us information that allows us to see
that the dinosaurs walked a certain way. But we don't get to see the walking itself.
There's also a problem with the usage of "like" here. Remember, "like" has to compare nouns. What nouns are compared? "Mammals and birds" to "their bodies?" That doesn't make sense. It seems far more logical to compare actions: how dinosaurs
walked to how mammals and birds
do. When comparing actions, we'd want to use "as," so that's another strike against (C).
Quote:
(D) The tracks that dinosaurs left show that they walked with their feet directly under their bodies, as do mammals and birds, not extended out to the side in the manner of modern reptiles.
This looks okay. We have the plural "dinosaurs" for "they" to refer to. "As" properly compares actions. No other issues are jumping out, let's hang on to this one.
Quote:
(E) In the tracks they left, dinosaurs are shown walking with their feet under their bodies, like mammals and birds, not extended out to the side in the manner of modern reptiles.
Again, it seems as though the tracks are literally displaying dinosaurs walking. Worse, the dinosaurs appear to be walking
now. And then we've also got "like" illogically comparing "mammals and birds" to their bodies," as opposed to (D), which uses "as" to compare actions.
So (D) it is.
While I understand that C is wrong due to meaning issue, I am still not able to get why "Like" can't be used here to compare "Mammals and birds" with "Dinosaur".