This is one of my favorites, just because I see a lot of errors on it – but it’s actually really straightforward, and is easy to solve if you follow a couple of simple rules. And that doesn’t happen as often as we’d like on GMAT SC, unfortunately.
Quote:
A. Thelonious Monk, who was a jazz pianist and composer, produced a body of work both rooted
OK, the thing that should jump out at us is the word “both.” In this case, “both” is paired with the word “and” – and this is a very strict parallelism “trigger”. The word “both” and the word “and” must be followed by two parallel elements.
And in this case, we don’t have those parallel elements: “…both
rooted… and
Duke Ellington…” Nope: “rooted” is an adjective in this situation, and “Duke Ellington” definitely is not. So we can eliminate (A).
(And for anybody who was paying extremely close attention in our
YouTube webinar on parallelism and meaning: when I mentioned “special parallel triggers”, this both/and construction is one of the most important examples I had in mind.)
Quote:
B. Thelonious Monk, the jazz pianist and composer, produced a body of work that was rooted both
I’m OK with the use of “that” here: “that was rooted” just modifies the “body of work.” You could probably argue that the words “that was” aren’t strictly necessary, but they also aren’t doing any harm at all.
The more important thing is the parallelism again: “…both
in the stride-piano tradition… and
Duke Ellington…”
Nope, that’s definitely not parallel, either. (B) is out.
Quote:
C. Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, who produced a body of work rooted
Hm, no more “both”! That’s cool. Now the parallelism isn’t a problem at all: Willie (The Lion) Smith and Duke Ellington are parallel to each other in the non-underlined portion.
But now there’s a more subtle problem: this thing isn’t a legitimate sentence anymore, because the presumed subject of the sentence (“Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk”) never actually “performs” a main verb. I think we can agree that the part beginning with “who” is just modifying Thelonious Monk, so let’s strip that out for just a moment to see what we have: “Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk,… yet in many ways he stood apart from the mainstream jazz repertory.”
Huh? That makes no sense. Basically, the sentence is structured as a noun, followed by a modifier, followed by a dependent clause. That’s not a sentence. So (C) is out.
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D. Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk produced a body of work that was rooted
As in (C), we don’t have any parallelism issues here, since “both” has been removed. But unlike (C), (D) is actually a real sentence, since it starts with a nice, independent clause: “…Thelonious Monk produced a body of work…”
So let’s keep (D).
Quote:
E. Jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk produced a body of work rooted both
And we’re right back to the same parallelism problem as in (B): “…both
in the stride-piano tradition… and
Duke Ellington…” That’s just plain wrong, and we’re left with (D) as the correct answer.