Building on civilizations that preceded them in coastal Peru, the Moch

Hi @nehadass,

Firstly, let me post the correct version of the question and the answer choices here:

Building on civilizations that preceded them in coastal Peru, the Mochica developed their own elaborate society, based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting other wild and domestic resources.

a) based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting

b) based on the cultivation of such crops as corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and seafood, and the exploitation of

c) and basing it on the cultivation of crops like corn and beans, harvesting fish and seafood, and the exploiting of

d) and they based it on their cultivation of crops such as corn and beans, the harvest of fish and seafood, and exploiting

e) and they based it on their cultivating such crops like corn and beans, their harvest of fish and shellfish, and they exploited

It seems that you are not able to figure out how “harvesting” is parallel to “cultivation” and “exploitation” in choice B while “cultivating, harvesting, and exploiting” look absolutely parallel in Choice A.

Notice the presence of the preposition “of” after “harvesting”. “Harvesting” is the noun form of the verb “harvest”. There is no noun form of “harvest” that ends in “-ion”. However, the verbs “cultivate” and “exploit” do have their noun forms ending with “-ion” – “cultivation” and “exploitation”. That makes all these three noun parallel to each other even if “harvesting” looks a little different from the rest.

Now, “cultivating” and “exploiting” cannot be parallel to “harvesting of” because the first two are gerunds – the “-ing” form of verbs that act as noun but denotes action. Whenever the sentence requires the noun form of any word, we must write the real noun form of that word and not the gerund form.

Choice B is the only choice where all the entities appear in one uniform manner – “cultivation of”, “harvesting of”, and “exploitation of” – all noun forms followed by “of”.

And again, choice A cannot be the correct answer because it uses “like” for examples. The correct idiom to present examples is “such as”, correctly used in Choice B.

Hope this helps.
Thanks
Shraddha