Many athletes develop poor fundamentals when trying to compensate for

Question

Many athletes develop poor fundamentals when trying to compensate for an injury,  but they can correct these fundamentals  with hard work and dedication.
 
A. but they can correct these fundamentals
 
B. but are correctable
 
C. but they can correct it
 
D. which can be corrected
 
E. but these fundamentals can be corrected

Praveenksinha · Answer

Many athletes develop poor fundamentals when trying to compensate for an injury, but they can correct these fundamentals with hard work and dedication.

A. but they can correct these fundamentals :-  Correct

B. but are correctable :-  Subject missing

C. but they can correct it :- use of it is wrong

D. which can be corrected :-  Which is incorrect

E. but these fundamentals can be corrected :-  Passive voice

Shamsul Hoque Khan · Answer

A is the correct answer here.
B. What is correctable? Structure of the sentence makes us believe that athletes are correctable. Wrong
C.  "it"  is singular and can only refer to  "injury" . But we know that " "fundamentals"  should be placed here.
D.  "which"  refers to  "injury" . We are talking about correcting Injury.
E.  Active voice  is more preferable.

Ted2007 · Answer

I understand that in most occasions active voice is preferable than passive voice, but in the question, I would prefer E over A. As E avoid any pronoun ambiguity.

IMO, the "they" in A may refer back to athletes or poor fundamentals. Therefore, after weighting the preference between the active/passive style and pronoun ambiguity, I believe E is more preferable.

plaverbach · Answer

GMATNinja , I would second that, what is your take?

bb · Answer

Without going into the debate of whether this is a great example or not - I personally not loving it but I think it was written to illustrate/test a grammar rule so that's what we got. I would say 2 things:

1. Passive voice can be OK but it has to pass a higher standard of error. Meaning that the error in the active voice statement has to be meaningful. Otherwise slight ambiguity + active will win over passive. 
2. In this case, while you could argue that there is ambiguity by looking at "they", if you expand your vision, you will see that the statement says "they can correct these fundamentals" addresses 95% of the ambiguity since "they" can only really refer to athletes in that statement.

MBAB123 · Answer

plaverbach  and  Ted2007 , while I'm no expert, "They" clearly refers to "Athletes". Poor fundamentals cannot correct poor fundamentals. There is no ambiguity here IMO.

Many athletes develop poor fundamentals when trying to compensate for

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Many athletes develop poor fundamentals when trying to compensate for

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