Although producer prices rose at an unexpectedly steep rate in Septemb

Hi All,

Although producer prices rose at an unexpectedly steep rate in September, analysts said that the increase resulted mostly from temporary factors and not necessarily foreshadowing that there would be a resurgence of inflation.



The sentence is not written in a clear way to state the meaning of the sentence very clearly. The sentence says that producer prices rose at an unexpected steep rate in September. However, analysts said two things:
a. the increase resulted mostly from temporary factors, and
b. the increase did not necessarily foreshadow a resurgence of inflation.



Error Analysis

1. There is list here that has two entities, “resulted” and “foreshadowing”. These entities are not parallel. Since “resulted” fall into the non-underlined portion of the sentence, we need to make “foreshadowing” parallel to that.
2. The way the sentence has been written, it creates meaning error. We need to remove conjunction “that” to make the entities clear in the list.

POE:

Choice A: factors and not necessarily foreshadowing that there would be: Incorrect for the reasons stated above.

Choice B: factors and not necessarily that it foreshadowed: Incorrect. This choice changes the intended list in the sentence that also changes the meaning of the sentence.
i. The intended list per the sentence: Analysts said that the increase resulted from…, and did not foreshadow…

ii. The list per this choice: Analysts said that the increase resulted from… and (analysts said) not necessarily that it foreshadowed…

Per the original list, the analysts said both the things about the result. But per the list per this choice, analysts said that increase resulted from something but they necessarily did nit that increase foreshadowed something.

Choice C: factors and did not necessarily foreshadow: Correct. The two entities in the list “resulted” and “did not foreshadow” are parallel.

Choice D: factors, while not necessarily a foreshadowing of: Incorrect. Again “resulted” and “foreshadowing” are not parallel.

Choice E: factors, while it did not necessarily foreshadow that there would be: Incorrect. “that there would be…” leads to ambiguity in the meaning of the sentence.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha