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19 Mar 2015, 11:51
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C
Be sure to select an answer first to save it in the Error Log before revealing the correct answer (OA)!
Difficulty:
75%
(hard)
Question Stats:
38% (01:10) correct
62%
(01:23)
wrong
based on 560
sessions
History
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Result
Not Attempted Yet
Due to his temperament being fueled by distrusting technology, Stanley Kubrick did his best to insulate himself from what he termed "the pains of modern living."
(A) Due to his temperament being fueled by distrusting
(B) Because his temperament was being fueled by a distrust
(C) His temperament fueled by a distrust of
(D) Due to the fact that his temperament had been fueled by a distrust in
(E) Having had his temperament fueled by his lack of trust in
(A) Due to his temperament being fueled by distrusting
(B) Because his temperament was being fueled by a distrust
(C) His temperament fueled by a distrust of
(D) Due to the fact that his temperament had been fueled by a distrust in
(E) Having had his temperament fueled by his lack of trust in
Moderator Note: edited by Mike McGarry
20 Mar 2015, 16:06
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mindsprout
Dear mindsprout,
I'm happy to help with this.
First of all, it's important to understand the correction diction with "due to." The word "due" is an adjective, so it must modify the target noun, not a phrase or an entire action. See
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-idiom ... nsequence/
The target noun here is the man [ur=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrickl]Stanley Kubrick[/url], and the man Kubrick himself was not "due to his temperament." (A) & (D) are wrong because of this.
In (D), the structure with "because" + [full clause] is good. Unfortunately, the tense here is the past progressive.
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-verbs ... ive-tense/
That doesn't work with the logic here. We would say:
Kubrick's temperament was fueled by distrusting technology. = a fixed, constant state in the past
not:
Kubrick's temperament was being fueled by distrusting technology. = awkward, because it makes this sound like an ongoing action that someone was performing, but nature of a person's temperament is not the result of an action that someone else performs. This tense doesn't fit with the logic of the situation.
Choice (E) has what would be a grammatically correct participial modifier, but again, unfortunately, the tense is wrong. It uses the perfect participle, which would imply that the temperament was fueled at one past time, and then Kubrick's action of insulating himself came at another later time. This changes the meaning from the prompt, so this is wrong.
This leaves the OA, (C). This uses a sophisticated grammatical structure known as an absolute phrase:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/absolute-p ... -the-gmat/
This structure is unfamiliar even to many native-English-speaking Americans, because it appears and is used properly only in very sophisticated writing.
The structure
[noun] +[noun modifier] ---- the most common is [noun] + [participial phrase], which we have here.
operates as a free-standing unit separate from the rest of the sentence, and it general modifies the action of the independent clause with which it is associated. This is an absolute phrase.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
General Discussion
21 Mar 2015, 21:41
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thanks for the detailed explanation
