About 5 million acres in the United States have been invaded by leafy

egmat

Hi Shraddha Thanks for clarification.

I have one question for choice B. "that" after the non-vital modifier "with milky sap" what does it refer to?
Because in one of my questions, when i choose a choice that had "that" modifier separated from the noun by a non-vital modifier (as with choice B for the questions), i was marked wrong, So i rejected choice B for this question.
"that" also needs to be repeated before "displace grasses...."

Can you please help clarify the doubt/concept.

Thanks

Hi experts,

I understand??the discussion around Choice B per empowergmatverbal's words that "rendering" doesn't need to be parallel to the other two here because it is being used to indicate that #1 and #2 on the list lead to #3 happening, so it's okay to keep it the way it is.

However, for Choice A:??Why can't "displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless" dually modify "a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle" together?????

I can see how #1 and #2 lead into "rendering rangeland worthless", but is there a rule around two -ing modifiers together joined by a connector word (e.g., and) not being able to modify a clause before the comma???

I am still also slightly confused by the difference in meaning here between Choices A and B. How do we know that points #1 and #2 definitely??lead to #3???

Thank you for bearing with me

The key thing to notice here is that what the (A) version conveys doesn't make sense.

Here's the (A) version:

About 5 million acres in the United States have been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle, displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless.

Now, let's break out the part you're concerned with:

a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle, displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless

To see why this is incorrect, notice that "milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle, displacing grasses and other cattle food" doesn't make sense because it conveys that, by giving mouth sores to cattle, milky sap displaces grasses and other cattle food. After all, milky sap would not displace grasses by giving cattle mouth sores.

a student recently asked me about this question.

this question serves well to illustrate one of the most important features of GMAT SC: if you stay focused on FUNDAMENTALS — and stay aware of the common-sense INTENDED MEANING of the sentence (which you should always figure out as the very first step of any SC problem), you'll be able to solve the vast majority of SC problems — even the "hard" ones — without needing to consider anything beyond those basics.

for this problem, all we need is overall structure, parallelism, and the usage of comma + __ing modifiers (= the single most commonly tested type of modifier in GMAT SC).

.

OVERALL STRUCTURE:

the cue to think about overall structure is the difference between "HAVE been invaded" (a VERB), in choices A/B/C, and "HAVING been invaded" (a MODIFIER), in choices D/E.
(if you see this kind of difference, then one version MUST be wrong. if the verb works, then the modifier will create a sentence fragment with no verb; if the modifier works, then the verb will create a run-on sentence with two verbs "stuck together".)

here, choices D/E are not sentences — they're fragments, with no main verb.
eliminate these.

choices A/B/C, on the other hand, ARE constructed as legitimate complete sentences.

.


PARALLELISM & COMMA __ING modifiers:

each of choices A/B/C puts different elements in parallel. these choices also construct the comma + __ing modifier differently.
to decide which version is correct, we'll need to appeal to common-sense meaning.

CHOICE A:
in this choice, the comma + __ing modifier has two parts (which are written in parallel): "displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless".
this modifier implies that BOTH of these __ing's modify "gives mouth sores to cattle" (the action of the preceding clause).
this is NONSENSE — it's clearly not possible for "displacing grasses and other cattle food" to be any sort of reasonable description or immediate consequence of the mouth sores.
eliminate.

CHOICE B:
this choice puts two actions in parallel: "gives mouth sores to cattle and displaces grasses and other cattle food". also, comma + "rendering rangeland worthless" modifies "displaces grasses and other cattle food" (= the preceding action).
all of this MAKES SENSE!
• the parallel verbs are two DIFFERENT/SEPARATE things that leafy spurge does;
• "rendering rangeland worthless" is an IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCE of the displacement of food, and thus makes sense as a modifier of that action.
CORRECT ANSWER

CHOICE C:
this choice puts two modifiers in parallel: "having milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle and displacing grasses and other cattle food".
this is NONSENSE.
in this sentence, the parallel elements SHOULD be the TWO ADVERSE ACTIONS of leafy spurge:
• it gives mouth sores to cattle,
• it displaces cattle food.
these items are NONparallel here. instead, this choice uses a parallel structure to connect two items that just don't make any sense as "two bullet points".
eliminate.

About 5 million acres in the United States have been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle, displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless.

(A) States have been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle, displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering
(B) States have been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia, with milky sap, that gives mouth sores to cattle and displaces grasses and other cattle food, rendering
(C) States have been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia having milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle and displacing grasses and other cattle food, rendering
(D) States, having been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle, displaces grasses and other cattle food, and renders
(E) States, having been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia that has milky sap giving mouth sores to cattle and displacing grasses and other cattle food, rendering

Sorry, I'm maniacally late to the party here, but I'll throw in my two cents anyway, even though it's probably too late to be useful.

You're certainly right that (B) changes the meaning of the sentence, but this is not a reason to eliminate an answer choice. You can eliminate an answer choice if it creates an illogical meaning, but just “changing” the meaning isn’t necessarily a crime.

In this case, the question-writer doesn't expect us to come in with any prior information about leafy spurge, so the question about whether it's the plant or the sap that causes the sores can't be the deciding factor. We need to look for other, more concrete decision points.

Take another look at (A):


As several smart people have noted, this construction makes it sound as though "displacing grasses" is a consequence of the milky sap giving mouth sores to cattle. How would giving mouth sores to cattle make grass disappear? This makes no sense. And because this modification is illogical, (A) is out.

Takeaway: if one of the answer choices changes the original meaning, but it's better, that's a good thing.

I hope that helps!

MartyTargetTestPrep

Thank you so much for your response.
To clarify, if the sentence read as follows: "States have been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia, with milky sap, displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless." Would "displacing...worthless" modify "with milky sap"? Essentially, are you allowed to have two -ing mods offset by one comma modifying this part of the sentence?

Thank you again.
Why can't "displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless" dually modify "a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle" together??

Thank you so much for your response.
To clarify, if the sentence read as follows: "States have been invaded by leafy spurge, a herbaceous plant from Eurasia, with milky sap, displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless." Would "displacing...worthless" modify "with milky sap"? Essentially, are you allowed to have two -ing mods offset by one comma modifying this part of the sentence?

Thank you again.
Why can't "displacing grasses and other cattle food and rendering rangeland worthless" dually modify "a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle" together??

KarishmaB GMATNinja
would be so appreciative for an expert's response

egmat GMATNinja

Is it safe to ignore/cross-out the modifiers? In this case, if ignoring/crossing-out the modifiers is safe, I can ignore the modifier "a herbaceous plant from Eurasia with milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle", which seems to modify the leafy spruge. Hence, displacing... and rendering... can correctly modify leafy spurge. Please guide me.

Thank You

Let's take a look at the apparent parallelism in (C). Ignoring the prepositional phrase ("from Eurasia"), we have, "a herbaceous plant from Eurasia (1) having milky sap that gives mouth sores to cattle and (2) displacing grasses and other cattle food..."

Let's jump right to the second part: "[a herbaceous plant] displacing grasses and other cattle food..."

• So leafy spurge is a plant displacing grasses and other cattle food? What exactly does that mean?
• In this context, the -ing form of displacing seems to suggest that this action is going on only temporarily -- that the plant is currently displacing grasses/other cattle food but that this doesn't happen all the time.
• If that doesn't make sense, think of this example: "The man yelling in the street has attracted a lot of attention." Here, "yelling in the street" is not a characteristic of the man; the man is not always yelling in the street. Instead, the man is currently yelling in the street and will presumably stop at some point.
• But is the plant only displacing grasses/other cattle food right now? Will it stop displacing grasses/other cattle food sometime in the near future??
• That doesn't make much sense. "Displacing grasses and other cattle food" is a characteristic of the plant -- something the plant constantly does. If you put that plant anywhere with grasses, the plant will presumably start displacing those grasses. That's what the plant does.
• So it makes more sense to say, "a herbaceous plant THAT displaces grasses." This construction properly suggests that displacing grasses is something that the plant does by nature.

The first part ("a herbaceous plant having milky sap") isn't great, either. I don't see why we would want to use the "-ing" form of "to have" here. You wouldn't say, "I bought a computer having 8GB of RAM." Instead, you would say, "I bought a computer that has 8 GB of RAM." Again, the "-ing" form seems to suggest that the "having" is temporary condition instead of a lasting characteristic, and that doesn't make sense in this context.

Now, please don't misinterpret that as some sort of made-up rule that "-ing" modifiers can ONLY be used to describe temporary conditions -- that's certainly not true.

Consider this example:

"The house facing southeast gets a lot of direct sunlight."

This is fine because the reader KNOWS that this is not a temporary action -- a house doesn't face southeast one moment and then suddenly rotate! (Well, maybe Elon Musk has a rotating house, but most houses stay put.)

On the other hand, "displacing grasses" might be a temporary action or a permanent characteristic of the plant. So IN THIS CONTEXT, the "-ing" modifiers aren't ideal. The parallel structure in (C) might LOOK okay, but it creates a couple of weird meaning issues.

Also, notice that in (C) we have an "-ing" modifier ("rendering") that modifies the parallel set of "-ing" modifiers ("a herbaceous plant having milky sap and displacing grasses and other cattle food"). This causes additional confusion because the reader might initially think that the third "-ing" modifier ("rendering") is part of that parallel list ("having {...} and displacing...").

(B) avoids all of those issues, making the meaning much clearer. (C) might not have any clear-cut grammar mistakes, but (B) is definitely the better choice.

I hope that helps!

Hi experts!

I'm convinced that B is a perfect sentence itself, but as GMATNinja pointed out, the relative clause 'that gives...' now modifies 'a herbaceous plant...' instead of 'milky sap'. It would make more sense, indeed, but it is changing the original meaning, isn't it I'm quite confused about this...

Hi experts!

I'm convinced that B is a perfect sentence itself, but as GMATNinja pointed out, the relative clause 'that gives...' now modifies 'a herbaceous plant...' instead of 'milky sap'. It would make more sense, indeed, but it is changing the original meaning, isn't it I'm quite confused about this...

CHOICE B:
this choice puts two actions in parallel: "gives mouth sores to cattle and displaces grasses and other cattle food". also, comma + "rendering rangeland worthless" modifies "displaces grasses and other cattle food" (= the preceding action).
all of this MAKES SENSE!
• the parallel verbs are two DIFFERENT/SEPARATE things that leafy spurge does;
• "rendering rangeland worthless" is an IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCE of the displacement of food, and thus makes sense as a modifier of that action.
CORRECT ANSWER