As the former CEO of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts built tech-savvy retail

This isn’t an official question – and you probably know how I feel about those – but the question still deals with some interesting GMAT-like stuff. There are some “mechanical” elements (verb tenses, parallelism) that you ideally should notice right away, but the mechanics aren’t quite enough: you’ll have to think about meaning if you want to eliminate stuff efficiently. (For more on parallelism and meaning, check out our long YouTube webinar.)


Right off the bat, there’s a funky meaning issue here. “As the former CEO of Burberry, Angela Ahrendts built tech-savvy stores…” Wait, no: she didn’t do those things as the former CEO. She did them when she actually WAS the CEO. (A similar little meaning issue can be found in this classic, official question: https://gmatclub.com/forum/as-the-forme ... 69993.html.)

Also, I’m not 100% sold on the way the parallelism interacts with the meaning here. “As the former CEO, Angela Ahrendts… built tech-savvy retail stores…, influenced the fashion industry, and later joined Apple…” Structurally, those three past-tense verbs (“built”, “influenced”, “joined”) are parallel, but they aren’t really things that she did during her time as CEO – and they aren’t things that she did during her time as a former CEO, either.

(A) is out.


There’s all sorts of weird stuff in this one, mostly related to the logical sequence of events. Whenever a GMAT question uses different verb tenses, the actions must occur at different times. In other words: this is all about matching the verb tenses to the logical meaning of the sentence.

The use of present perfect tense (“…Ahrendts has built tech-savvy retail stores…”) suggests that she started building them in the past, and is still building them in the present. Fair enough, but the rest of the verbs in the sentence are in simple past tense (“was… influential” and “joined Apple”), and it’s hard to understand how that sequence of events could work. As CEO, she first built the stores, and then later became influential on the fashion industry... at around the same time she joined Apple, which isn’t exactly a fashion company? That really doesn’t make much sense.

If you wanted to be conservative, you could hang onto (B), but we’ll have a better option in a moment.


I don’t mind the use of the “-ing” modifier “building tech-savvy retail stores…”: it could plausibly tell us how, exactly she influenced the fashion industry. That’s not unreasonable, I guess.

The trouble is the parallelism and meaning: “As the former CEO of Burberry, Ahrendts influenced the fashion industry, (modifier), and joined Apple…” Wait, she couldn’t possibly have done both of those things as the former CEO of Burberry. She did the first thing AS the CEO – not as the former CEO – and she joined Apple later. These two verbs really shouldn’t be parallel, at least not as the sentence is currently constructed.

It’s a little bit subtle, but (C) is out.


(D) seems completely fine. The sentence very clearly tells us what Ahrendts did as the actual CEO of Burberry – not as the former CEO. Then, the business about joining Apple is very clearly presented as a completely separate action, in a completely separate independent clause that’s properly separated with a semicolon. Keep (D).


This sounds OK superficially, but if we dig into the parallelism, we run into a problem. We have a nice “-ing” word that follows the word “and”, so we’ll need a couple of parallel “-ing” words. (More on those here.)

So we have: “…Ahrendts influenced the fashion industry by building tech-savvy retail stores… and joining Apple…” No, that doesn’t make sense: how could she influence the fashion industry by joining Apple?

(E) is gone, and (D) is the best we can do.