Dear
crunchboss,
I'm happy to respond.
My friend, I am going to begin by chiding you for using imprecise language. Imprecise language leads to imprecise thinking. If you want to understand all the nuances of grammar, it's necessary to use the most rigorous language. Using precise and rigorous language at all times is one of the habits of excellence. The imprecise phrase you used is "
VERB + ING Modifiers." As you may understand, the so-called -ing form of a verb has three uses:
1) part of a
progressive tense verb construction, as a full verb
2) a present
participle, which can be a noun-modifier or a verb-modifier
3) a
gerund. which takes noun roles
Participles as modifiers are extraordinary. As noun modifiers, they are bound by the Touch Rule and so forth. As verb modifiers, that is, as adverbial phrases, they have tremendous freedom. I would say: don't be too attached to your long list of rules for participles as verb-modifiers---think of them more as guidelines than mathematical rules. Any verb-modifier, insofar as it modifies the action of a clause, essentially modifies the entire clause: there's at best a blurry line between clause modifiers and verb modifiers.
Now, in this question, I agree that (A) has a subtle but awkward misplaced modifier problem. Choice (D), in addition to the misplaced modifier, is a complete disaster: both (C) and (D) should be taken out back and shot.
Option (B) is interesting. As a general rule, when you see the participle "
being," a dozen red flags should go off in your head. It's not automatically wrong, but more than 95% of the answer choices that have the participle "
being" in them are wrong. Here, (B) is a trainwreck.
I actually would say that the participle "
being" is used as NOUN modifier here. What is "
the only eyewitness account of the great eruption of Vesuvius"? Those two letters. This is a noun-modifying participial phrase dutifully obeying the Modifier Touch Rule, touching the noun it modifies, "
two letters." What's particularly awkward about using "
being" to open a noun-modifier is that one almost always could replace it with a more elegant
appositive phrase.
Here, very technically, the two letter are not coextensive in their existence with the "
only eyewitness account." Technically, the two letter
contain or
convey or
provide the "
only eyewitness account." One of those verbs or a similar verb, used as a noun-modifying participle, would enormously improve (B)
(B2)
To the historian Tacitus, the nephew of Pliny the Elder wrote two letters conveying the only eyewitness accounts of the great eruption of Vesuvius.
That's not ideal, but it's correct enough to be a right answer on the GMAT SC.
Now, what the OE said. My friend, keep in mind that each official question in the
OG or GMAT Prep is of the highest caliber---I would argue among the finest standardized test questions on planet Earth. Think of each official question as the equivalent of the Crown Jewels of England. By contrast, the official explanations are the equivalent of some reasonably nice jewelry from Walmart. The difference is simply embarrassing. I write questions all the time: at my very best, I write questions almost as good as the official questions, but even if I were deprived of sleep for three days I could write better explanations of questions that the
OG has. The official questions have been rigorously vetted in several formal psychometric procedures over the course of years. The OEs were written years later, probably by tired starving graduate students on contract work: from what I can tell, the OEs have undergone almost no feedback. It's like the difference between Shakespeare and a cheap paperback thriller, and as it's if the two have been bound together in the same book and packaged as if they are of the same worth. Don't be fooled. Here's a page with
Magoosh explanations for all the questions in the OG13:
https://gmat.magoosh.com/forum/books/13- ... at-13th-edHere's what I would say about the OE's description. Infinitives and participles and gerunds are all called "
verbals"---that is, verb forms that are acting in some "non-verb" capacity in the sentence. All three of them can take direct objects & modifiers to form phrases: infinitive phrases, participial phrase, and gerund phrases. We could call all those "verbal phrases," or as the OE says, "verb phrases." That's imprecise language, typical of the OE, and of the sort I would urge you to avoid.
BTW, the "nephew of
Pliny the Elder" was
Pliny the Younger. On the day of the
eruption of Vesuvius, the former was on the volcano itself, inspecting the geological changes that had been happening leading up the eruption, and the latter was across the bay at a kind of base camp, observing the volcano from afar. When the eruption suddenly took place, the uncle was killed instantly, and the nephew
de facto was an eye-witness of the event. A very educated man, Pliny the Younger wrote to his very intelligent friend
Tacitus about the eruption.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)