All-terrain vehicles have allowed vacationers to reach many previously

(A) deaths, injury to thousands, and seriously damaging --- bad parallelism
(B) deaths and injuring thousands, and serious damage to --- bad parallelism
(C) deaths, thousands who are injured, as well as seriously damaging --- as well as is not a marker for parallelism.
(D) deaths and thousands of injuries, as well as doing serious damage to ---- correct parallelism around 'and' + 'as well as' is used to add thing up. best option.
(E) deaths, thousands are injured, and they do serious damage to --- they ??? what for???

daagh AjiteshArun
injuring thousands and thousands of injuries ?
Aren't they both different ?
Can you please brief ?

teaserbae
The context demands parallelism of causing " hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries" as well as doing serious, which the correct option D maintains — no need to bother about other choices. Structurally injuring thousands doesn't sync with serious damage in B

All-terrain vehicles have allowed vacationers to reach many previously inaccessible areas, but they have also been blamed for causing hundreds of deaths, injury to thousands, and seriously damaging the nation's recreational areas.

In the sentence we are told that all-terrain vehicles are blamed for a few things.

A is incorrect because "causing X,Y, and causing seriously damaging" does not make sense. This literal interpretation is because "causing" can logically must refer to the three things that follow "causing", so "seriously damaging" should be cut off this list.

B is missing a verb, so the items just don't make sense: "Causing X and Y, and Serious damage to..."

C taken literally means "causing thousands who are injured" - does not make sense.

D is correct because we state: "causing X and Y, as well as (additive) doing (verb) Z" which is an accepted structure to communicate that two things were caused and a separate thing, the serious damage to recreational areas, also resulted.

E taken literally doesn't make sense "causing thousands are injured"...

daagh
Need help with this one :
B)
blamed for
causing hundreds of deaths and injuring thousands(verbing as gerund)
,and
serious damage to the nation's area (noun +modifier)

so is this not parallel beacuse of gerund vs noun +modifier

Also this part :
causing hundreds of deaths and injuring thousands
is causing vs injuring parallel?
i am thinking of causing hundreds of deaths as one thing and injuring thousands as others since both are gerunds so should be parallel

why it has to be this way to be parallel
causing
hundreds of deaths and
thousands of injuries

and not
causing[ hundreds of deaths ]
and
injuring [thousands]

vanam

My point is that we must first decide how many items are there in the given list. Are there two or three? A, B and E consider the list as containing three items by using the fanboys 'and' give 'serious damage' as one more equal item as the other two.

Unfortunately, it is not so. One is death and the other injury is potential death. One cannot consider them on par with damage to recreational areas. That is the reason C and D separate the damage as a lesser evil by joining it with an additive 'as well as '
You must consider separating the first two items with fanboys as done in D.
Now you may not have doubts about the parallelism of hundred of deaths and thousands of injuries.

We can solve this quickly if we understand that we are looking for parallelism.

So, in the non-underlined part it says ‘causing hundreds of…’ We need the other elements in the list to agree with this -ing form.

Based on this, we can eliminate Options A, B, C, and E.

(A) deaths, injury to thousands, and seriously damaging
(B) deaths and injuring thousands, and serious damage to
(C) deaths, thousands who are injured, as well as seriously damaging
(D) deaths and thousands of injuries, as well as doing serious damage to
(E) deaths, thousands are injured, and they do serious damage to

Option D is the best choice.

Hope this helps!

All-terrain vehicles have allowed vacationers to reach many previously inaccessible areas, but they have also been blamed for causing hundreds of deaths, injury to thousands, and seriously damaging the nation's recreational areas.

Meaning Analysis: ATVs have allowed us to reach inaccessible places. BUT, these ATVs have also done a lot of harm. They have caused deaths, have injured thousands and have damaged areas used for recreation purposes.

Sentence Structure:
All-terrain vehicles (plural subject)
have allowed (plural verb)
vacationers to reach many previously inaccessible areas (object of the sentence)
, but (parallel marker) (,FANBOYS used to separate two ICs)
they (plural subject) (pronoun referring to plural noun "ATVs")
have also been blamed for (plural verb)
causing hundreds of deaths (element 1 of parallelism)
, injury to thousands (element 2 of parallelism)
, and (parallelism marker)
seriously damaging the nation's recreational areas. (element 3 of parallelism)


The group of words "have been blamed for" is taken common for all the three elements. Element 2 of the parallel list "injury to thousands" does not make sense with "have been blamed for". ATVs have been blamed for causing hundreds of deaths have been blamed for damaging the nation's... have been blamed for "injury to thousands". The way the sentence is written makes this choice inferior.

We could also take "have also been blamed for causing" as the common element in which case hundreds of deaths and injury to thousands would make sense BUT seriously damaging the nation's... would not.

Ask yourself does "ATVS have been blamed for causing seriously damaging the nation's..." make sense?


The usage of multiple "and" makes this choice less preferable. We say X, Y, and Z. We do not say X and Y, and Z.

I believe have been blamed for causing deaths, injuring thousands, and serious damage to would have been correct. In this case "causing" "injuring" and "damage" are three nouns. YES, "damaging" would be more ideal BUT I do not think that this parallelism would be incorrect.

WHY? Because as explained by GMATNinja in parallelism, the elements have to be of the same structure. I.e... ALL have to be nouns, or verbs, or modifiers, or clauses... BUT that does not mean they have to be EXACTLY of the same wordings.


ATVs have been blamed for "thousands who are injured". Ask yourself, does this sentence make sense?


ATVs have been blamed for causing hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries . This sentence structure is correct as "causing" is taken as the common element for the two parallel elements separated by "and". "doing serious damage" is parallel to "causing" and these two elements are connected by an additive phrase.

So the sentence structure is causing X and Y, as well as doing


Have been blamed for causing "thousands are injured" Clearly this sentence does not make sense. Moreover the last element of the list "they do serious damage..." is a clause. ONLY a clause can be parallel to another clause. Out here the first two elements are nouns and thus the parallelism is incorrect.


Correct Choice: (D)

Can someone please help me with A , why A is eliminated .

Thanks

The major flaw with (A) is the parallelism used.

If you take "have been blamed for causing" as the common entity then the three Elements are
(1) hundreds of deaths
(2) injury to thousands
(3) seriously damaging the nation's recreational areas

While the first two elements make sense, the third element does not.

Ask yourself, does "have been blamed for causing seriously damaging the nation's recreational areas" make sense??

Moreover,
If we choose to take "have been blamed for" as the common entity we get
(1) causing hundreds of deaths
(2) injury to thousands
(3) seriously damaging the nation's recreational areas

While "causing" and "damaging" are parallel, "injury" is not.

E.g. The Joker likes causing pain, injury to thousands and damaging Gothams public property.

Here "The Joker likes" is the common entity while (1) causing (2) damaging and (3) injury are the three elements of the parallel list.

Clearly we see that "Injury" is not parallel to the other two words.


Note-
1. When elements have to be parallel, they have to be of the same structure.

2. This means that all the elements have to be verbs or nouns or modifies etc.

3. This DOES NOT MEAN that they have to be of the same wording.
E.g we can have a verb-ed modifier and a verb-ing modifier as parallel entities since they both perform the role of being a modifier. (GMATNinja has explained this concept in an OG question. Unable to find the link to that question)

4. However, if we have an answer choice that does not violate the grammar rules and conveys the intended meaning, while at the same time has the structure + wordings same, we will prefer to select this answer choice.

I hope this helps!

Posted from my mobile device

Thanks for the wonderful explanation
its crystal clear now.

CrackVerbalGMAT GMATNinja

In option D, how do we know that the parallelism does not start after "blamed", so it is not needed to repeat "for"?

D is the only one that maintains parallelism "hundreds of deaths, and thousands of injuries" while keeping the meaning more precise.

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