Among lower-paid workers, union members are less likely than non union

Hi All,

Among lower- paid workers, union members are less likely than non-union members to be enrolled in lower- end insurance plans imposing stricter limits on medical services and requiring doctors to see more patients, and spend less time with each.



Among lower-paid workers, union members are less likely than non-union members to be enrolled in lower-end insurance plans. Now these plans do things:
a. they impose stricter limits on medical services, and
b. they require doctors to see more patients.
Now if the doctors are required to see more patients, then they will spend less time with each patient.



Error Analysis:

1. The modifiers “imposing” and “requiring” correctly modify “lower-end insurance plans”, and they are parallel as well. However, “spend less time” fails to show that this action is the effect of doctors seeing more patients per the plans.
2. The only way to show this effect is by turning verb “spend” into verb-ing modifier “spending” to actually show the outcome.
3. This change alone however will not solve the problem because when we have comma + verb-ing modifier, it modifies the preceding clause. With the original sentence structure, the only clause we have is “union members are less likely…”. This is certainly the wrong modification.
4. Hence we need to change verb-ing modifiers “imposing” and “requiring” to “that” clauses so that maintain the parallelism as well as “spending” can correctly modify the “that” clause that talks about the doctors required to see more patients.

POE:

Choice A: imposing stricter limits on medical services and requiring doctors to see more patients, and spend: Incorrect for the reasons stated above.

Choice B: imposing stricter limits on medical services, requiring doctors to see more patients, and spending: Incorrect. Turning verb “spend” into verb-ing modifier “spending” now makes it parallel with “imposing” and “requiring”. The sentence now means that the new plans will spend less time with each patient. This is not logical.

Choice C: that impose stricter limits on medical services, require doctors to see more patients, and spend: Incorrect. This choice repeats the same error by making “impose”, “require”, and “spend” parallel.

Choice D: that impose stricter limits on medical services and require doctors to see more patients, spending: Correct. The verbs "impose” and “requires” are parallel with the use of “that” clause that correctly shows what the new plans do. Verb-ing modifier “spending” now correctly modifies the preceding action "required to see", correctly showing the effect of the preceding action. The thing to note about the usage of comma + verb-ing modifier is that generally we say that this modifier modifies the preceding clause. But actually this modifier modifies the preceding action. This action may not necessarily be the verb of the preceding clause. It can be an action denoted by the "to verb" phrase. But because generally, a comma _ modifier appears after a clause, we say that it modifies the preceding clause.

In this answer choice, "spending" actually modifies the preceding action "to see" by presenting the result of this action. If doctors are required to see more patients, they will have to spend less time with each to accommodate more patients, Also, "spending" makes sense with the doer of the action denoted by "to see" that is "doctors" as the doctors will spend less time with each patient in order to see more patients.

Choice E: that impose stricter limits on medical services, requiring doctors to see more patients and spending: Incorrect. By making “requiring” and “spending” parallel, the sentence now suggests that these two are the effects of imposing the stricter limits on medical services. This is certainly not the intended meaning of the sentence.



Hi there,
Use of any kind of modifier is completely governed by the context of the sentence. I personally do not like to give out rules but to make it simple for you, I can suggest that use comma + verb-ing modifiers to give additional information or show the results or effects of the preceding clause.

When you need to modify a noun entity, you can either use just the verb-ing modifier or the “that” clause immediately after that noun entity.

When you have a situation like this sentence where we have two modifiers, then use “that” clause to modify the noun entity and use comma + verb-ing modifier to show the effect of the preceding clause.

In this sentence, we could only ascertain where to use which modifier only after we understood the meaning of the sentence. Hence, the key to determine the use of various modifiers is to first understand the logical intended meaning of the sentence and then decide which modifier to use depending upon the roles these modifiers play. So this means that you must have the knowledge of the roles played by various modifiers.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha