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(A) whether tourists will continue to visit game parks and see rhinoceroses after their horns are
(A) has a couple of subtle little problems. For starters, I don’t think the phrase “…will continue to visit game parks
and see rhinoceroses…” is quite right in this case. Grammatically, it’s fine: “visit” and “see” are parallel verbs. Trouble is, that suggests that the two actions are somehow equally weighted, and not necessarily related: tourists visit game parks, and tourists see rhinos, but maybe not at the same time.
So the phrasing in (A) isn't WRONG, exactly, but it’s not ideal: the intent of the sentence is to question whether tourists will continue to visit game parks TO SEE rhinos. And we have that option in some of the other answer choices.
You could also argue that the pronoun “their” is potentially ambiguous. It could refer to the rhinos or the tourists or the poachers, and only the rhinos would make sense, since tourists and poachers rarely trim their own horns. And again, pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule (more on that in
this video), but we’ll have better options in a moment.
If you wanted to be conservative, you could keep (A), but the problems in (A) will be fixed in another answer choice.
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(B) whether tourists will continue to visit game parks to see one once their horns are
(B) includes the phrase “visit game parks
to see [a rhino]…”, and that makes more sense than the parallel structure we saw in (A).
Trouble is, now the pronouns are worse. You could argue that “one” is a little bit ambiguous because it’s so far from “rhinoceroses”, but I can live with that – I don’t think it’s unclear, even if it isn’t awesome. But the “their” is definitely an issue: the nearest plurals are “game parks” and “tourists”, and neither of those are likely to have their horns trimmed. “Their” logically needs to refer to “rhinoceroses”, but that word is a long way from the pronoun now. That’s not cool.
So (B) is out.
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(C) whether tourists will continue to visit game parks to see rhinoceroses once the animals’ horns have been
(C) fixes all of the problems and imperfections of (A) and (B). We have “…continue to visit game parks to see rhinoceroses…”, and that’s better than the parallel version in (A). The pronoun has been completely removed, so now we have “once the animals’ horns have been trimmed” – and that’s clear as a bell.
Let’s keep (C).
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(D) if tourists will continue to visit game parks and see rhinoceroses once the animals’ horns are
(D) has the same parallelism problem as (A): “visit game parks and see rhinos” makes less sense than “visit game parks TO see rhinos.” See the explanation for (A) for more on this issue.
The GMAT also tends to frown on the use of “if” in situations like these. The GMAT seems to think that “if” can only be used for “if/then” (conditional) statements, but NOT for situations like this sentence, when the intent is just to indicate that two different alternatives are possible (e.g., visiting vs. not visiting game parks). I think that’s a silly thing for the GMAT to test, but who cares what I think?
The shorter version: if you’re given a choice between “if” and “whether” on the GMAT, then you’ll almost certainly want to choose “whether.”
So (D) is out.
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(E) if tourists will continue to visit game parks to see one after the animals’ horns have been
The only major problem in (E) is the use of “if.” See (D) for more on that issue.
So (E) is gone, and we’re left with (C).
Thanks for the detailed explanation. However, I have a query regarding pronoun ambiguity. You mentioned in option A that "their" could refer to rhinos or tourists or poachers and eventually eliminated tourists and poachers saying that only rhinos make sense since rhinos have horns.
So, I wanted to know when do we say that there's pronoun ambiguity? Is it when there are more than 1 contenders (nouns) for a pronoun and all or some of them make sense
Can we say that there's pronoun ambiguity even if there are multiple nouns but only 1 of them is contender because only this 1 contender makes sense (like in this option A)?