Typically, when you have a pronoun as the subject of a clause, the most logical place to look for a referent is the subject of the previous clause. In (E), the subject of the first clause is "federal authorities." It certainly wouldn't make any sense to claim that it's the federal authorities who are suspicious of strangers, rather than the local witnesses. So the issue here isn't pronoun ambiguity, but rather, the illogical meaning created by the pronoun. (And it's true that pronoun ambiguity isn't an absolute rule on the GMAT. More on that in this video.)

As for the parallelism, take another look at (C). "Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found that local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and suspicious of strangers." The parallel elements in red are all adjectives describing the witnesses. It's fine that two of those adjectives are themselves modified by the parts in blue - there's no grammar rule that says that all elements of a list have to look exactly the same. They just have to perform the same function. Here they all describe the "witnesses," so there's no problem.

I hope that helps!
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292. Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are suspicious of strangers.
(A) the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are
'that' is missing, 'are' is redundant
(B) local witnesses to be difficult to locate, reticent, and are
'to locate (infinitive), reticent (adjective), and are (present)' not parallel
(C) that local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and
'witnesses are X, Y, and Z' parallel and correct!
(D) local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent, and they are
'they are' is redundant
(E) that local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent, and they are
'they are' is redundant

Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are suspicious of strangers.

A. the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are
B. local witnesses to be difficult to locate, reticent, and are
C. that local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and
D. local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent, and they are
“They” is ambigious what does “they “ refer ? Local winesses or federal authories .

E. that local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent, and they are
“They” is ambigious what does “they “ refer ? Local winesses or federal authories .

“They” is ambigious what does “they “ refer ? Local winesses or federal authories .?? D and E out.
Local witnesses are
1. difficult to locate, (adj)
2. reticent, and (adj)
3. suspicious of strangers (adj)

There is no need to say” , and are" because as I have stated above the first “are “ conveys the other. Therefore A and B out.

C is correct

D and E are grammatically structure wise correct but meaning wise not.

Difficult (adjective ) to locate (verb)
Reticent (adjective)
Suspicious (adjective) of strangers.


Therefore difficult to locate and reticent is not correct; one must be aware of the meaning of reticent; if one considered it as a verb then one will end up picking D or E ... E is better over D.

C is right, bit tricky question exploiting vocabulary.

C doesn't make any sense...can anyone explain the meaning with C being the right answer ?

Posted from my mobile device

Hi,
Let me try

Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are suspicious of strangers.


(C) that local witnesses
are difficult to locate,
(are) reticent,
and
(are) suspicious of strangers

we don't need to repeat the 'are' in the above list.


Hope it helps.

Find needs "that" to be grammatically correct which leaves us with 2 options.
Option E unnecessarily uses "they" making it more ambiguous hence answer option C.

Total time taken to mark correct answer : 9 seconds.

Hi GMATNinja and mikemcgarry,

I was wondering could one of you please explain why option E is incorrect and C is? I eliminated C because I didn't find the option to be parallel. I noticed some people have said that option C is saying "FA have found the local witnesses are difficult to locate, (are) reticent, and (are) suspicious. However, I thought that the sentence was saying "FA have found the local witnesses are difficult to locate, (are difficult to) reticent, and (are difficult to) suspicious. I was wondering why is this wrong? Can't one interpret the sentence as this way as well? I founded option E to be a much better choice. There are arguments against E that "they" have no specific referent to it. I was under the impression that one cannot simply eliminate an answer solely on the pronoun ambiguity. Is there anything else that is wrong with option E? If one of you experts could please help clarify my doubts, I would greatly appreciate it!

Thank You!

Dear experts,
daagh GMATNinjaTwo IanStewart generis
I have a really fundamental doubt concerning parallelism:

If we ignore the egregious meaning error in option E and focus only on the parallelism, can "they" refer to local witnesses.
The structure of the sentence will be:
1. Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found that local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent
2. Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found that they are suspicious of strangers.
So technically if we split the sentence in the above forms shouldn't "they" refer only to authorities?

Here's the full sentence with choice (E):


We have two complete thoughts joined by a ", and":

1) Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found that local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent.
2) [They] are suspicious of strangers.

Written like this, the second part ("they are suspicious of strangers") does not seem to be something that the federal authorities FOUND. Rather, it's a separate idea entirely.

And the "they" is, at best, unclear. While pronoun ambiguity isn't a good reason to eliminate an answer choice, there's no good interpretation here. If "they" refers to "federal authorities", we end up with an incoherent meaning.

And if "they" refers to the "witnesses" then it seems as though the federal authorities discovered two characteristics of these witnesses - they're "difficult" and "reticent" - and, oh yeah, here's this other thing about witnesses that is totally unrelated and maybe wasn't found by the authorities. It makes far more sense to remove the pronoun entirely, as (C) does, and convey the idea that the authorities have found that witnesses possess all three characteristics described.

The takeaway: we don't ever want to disregard a meaning issue, since grammar issues are, at heart, about clarity and logic.

I hope that answers your question!
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Two key issues: parallelism and ambiguity.

...that local witnesses are
1. difficult to locate
2. reticent
3. suspicious of strangers

...is the correct ||

"they" in D/E are ambiguous ...is 'they' referring to the authorities or the local witnesses?

Federal authorities involved in the investigation have found the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are suspicious of strangers.

(A) the local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and are X
(B) local witnesses to be difficult to locate, reticent, and are X
(C) that local witnesses are difficult to locate, reticent, and CORRECT
(D) local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent, and they are X
(E) that local witnesses are difficult to locate and reticent, and they are X
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