For members of the seventeenth century Ashanti nation in Africa, anima

hi guys. in this sentence:
"....animal-hide shields with wooden frames [url]were[/url] essential items of military equipment, protecting warriors against enemy arrows and spears."
we do not have action verb in preceding sentence (we have a "were". no action happen in this case , why we must use participle (-ing)???? I thought we use it just for causality relation or result of action ! I Choose E but wrong .

09173140521 The -ing modifier is actually quite versatile and can modify the preceding action in many different ways. In this case, the modifier clarifies in what way the shields were essential.

Pls explain what is the role of phrase "For members of the seventeenth century Ashanti nation in Africa". Is it a noun modifier modifying the nearest noun "animal hide shields".

nannunanni007 The initial modifier is an adverbial modifier that modifies the main clause: "Shields were essential items." So we can read it as "Shields were essential items of equipment for members of the Ashanti nation."

Hi DmitryFarber
Can you explain it in detail How Prepositional Phrase "For members of the seventeenth century Ashanti nation in Africa" is acting as adverbial modifier.
From your suggest alternate formation of sentence "Shields were essential items of equipment for members of the Ashanti nation.", it appears that the prepositional phrase it modifying the object "essential items".

Thanks.

One more doubt DmitryFarber

I am referring Manhattan SC 4th edition for sentence correction. In modifiers chapter it is given that - Preposition + Simple Gerund is a verb modifier.
Ex. I lifted the weight by concentrating.
This modifier applies to both the verb and the verb's subject.
"by concentrating" is modifying the verb "lifted" and subject of verb makes sense with modifier - I was concentrating.

But I am unable to apply the above in ex - Mother keeps children from watching television .
"from watching television" is modifying the verb "keeps", but it does not make sense with subject "Mother".

Please explain.

nannunanni007 Unfortunately, we can rarely apply simple rules to grammar, especially in the case of modifiers. One could write a whole book on all the ways that adverbial modifiers can interact with other elements of a sentence. So if we see one case ("by concentrating"), we can't simply use that as the criterion for evaluating other cases. The fact is that in your second sentence, "from watching television" is an adverbial modifier. What else could it be? It can't be a noun modifier, or we'd be saying that the children are from a place called "watching television."

It may help to point out that when we use a noun modifier, it is modifying only the noun, and this modifier should make sense even in the absence of any action the sentence describes. So if "For members . . . " were a noun modifier, this would mean that the shields themselves were "for" members of the tribe. This doesn't have a clear meaning, and in fact I can't think of an example of an initial noun modifier beginning with "for." However, adverbial modifiers of this type are common:

For all I know, he is out of the country by now.
For many music fans, live concerts are more exciting than listening to music at home.
For a long time, I went to bed early.

Considering the introductory prepositional modifier as a noun modifier modifying 'essential items' will land in a grave modification error, as a genuine noun modifier will always have to start with the modified noun
immediately after the comma. Therefore, it cannot modify the distant "essential items"

At least one may argue that animal -hide shields could fit in as the modified noun. However, per se, the meaning becomes incomplete unless one can explain why they were essential items. That is the reason it becomes necessary to add the action of 'protecting'. It therefore becomes clear that the introductory modifier in this case can only be adverbial and not adjectival.

DmitryFarber GMATNinjaTwo, MikeScarn, GMATNinja, hazelnut, generis, egmat

Hi - I have gone through the forum discussion on choices C and E. I still have a few doubts. Can you please clarify.

1) My understanding of a comma + verb-ing modifier is that it modifies the preceding clause in 2 ways - a) by showing the how aspect b) by showing the result of the action. However, in this question, I am unable to understand how option C is fitting in (keeping in mind the 2 ways talked bwout earlier)

Option C reads - For members of the seventeenth century Ashanti nation in Africa, animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment, protecting warriors against enemy arrows and spears.

2) For option E, a lot of the responses said that to protect cant be preceded by a comma. Is it a rule? It doesnt seem like it because in this thread, there are some correct OG sentences that have used to + verb after a comma. Is there another reason to reject this? I am also not clear on whether this sentence can use the to + verb format here because I dont think it menas to show intention.

Option E reads - For members of the seventeenth century Ashanti nation in Africa, animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment, to protect warriors against enemy arrows and spears

In case, the sentence is written to show intention then would option E be correct if the comma wasnt there? The sentence would read - For members of the seventeenth century Ashanti nation in Africa, animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment to protect warriors against enemy arrows and spears.

Lastly, would we have 2 options present such as Option C and revised option E in the answer choices.

Thanks.

kanikab ,

I am afraid you may be trying to get too technical with grammar rules.

Our structure is: Prepositional Phrase, Independent clause, underlined portion.

If you choose (C), you create a verb+ing modifier phrase that modifies "animal-hide shields." This makes logical sense.

If you choose (E), you create an infinitive verb phrase. I eliminated this answer choice due to the sentence construction.

I would say you're on the right track about if we did not use a comma in (E), but it still wouldn't be a very clean sentence.

kanikab

1) As I stated above, there are actually many possible uses of an adverbial modifier such as ", protecting." We're certainly not limited to the two options you mentioned. However, we actually could see this as the HOW case, in that this protection shows HOW the shield were essential.

2) It's hard to create any general rule like "no comma before an infinitive." Nevertheless, here the comma doesn't make sense. It's not clear what the infinitive would be meant to connect or what that would mean. Your adjusted version (no comma) makes the intent a bit clearer, but "essential to protect" still doesn't work.

Normally, we'd say that an item is essential FOR something. We can use "essential to" followed by a noun, but then the "to" doesn't form an infinitive--it's just a preposition. "To X" simply modifies the preceding noun. Finally, we can use the infinitive "to protect," but only with the placeholder expression "It is essential" beforehand. "It is essential to do X" means the same as "To do X is essential."

An intuitive grasp of scales is essential for playing lead guitar.
An intuitive grasp of scales is essential to the mastery of lead guitar. ("to the mastery" is a prepositional modifier)
To master lead guitar, it is essential to achieve an intuitive grasp of scales. ("to achieve" is an infinitive that fills in our subject. It is what is essential.)

Finally, if we did have two valid answers, we wouldn't have a proper SC question. The four wrong answers are wrong!

Your understanding of how VERB-ing modifiers work when they follow CLAUSE + COMMA is correct. Either VERB-ing provides a consequence of the previous clause, or is giving context for that clause.

In (C) we have:

"...animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment, protecting warriors..."

This modification is perfectly logical - it provides context. How were the shields essential? By providing protection to warriors. Looks good.

But when we have a "to verb" (an infinitive, if you like jargon) following a full clause, typically the infinitive is giving us the intention of the previous subject. For example:

"Tim deprived himself of pancakes for three weeks to get himself in shape for Burning Man."

Tim made a conscious decision to stop eating pancakes, because he had the intention of getting in shape. So now look at (E) again:

"...animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment, to protect warriors..."

This makes it sound as though the shields consciously chose to be essential so that they could protect the warriors. In science fiction, perhaps. On the GMAT? Not so much. (E) is illogical, so (C) is our answer.

I hope that helps!

As in the option A :

For members of the seventeenth century Ashanti nation in Africa, animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment, a method to protect warriors against enemy arrows and spears.

Here I see the rejection of the option A because "animal-shield" or "military equipment" can not be a method. My observation is that we are rejecting this option on this ground that we are treating the phrase "a method to protect warriors against enemy arrows and spears" as an appositive. But if we treat it as an absolute phrase then it looks like it is rightly modifying the entire preceding clause.

Take another example of absolute phrase taken from MGMAT book on SC :
Last night our air conditioner broke, an event that caused great consternation.

Here the highlighted part is an absolute phrase, which modifies the entire preceding clause. We can not mark this sentence incorrect on the ground that "air conditioner" is not an event. Here the "event" is capturing the incidence of breaking of the air conditioner. In similar way, why can't we denote the "animal shielding with wooden frame" as a method over here?

Addendum to this, I think that the phrase - "a method to protect warriors against enemy arrows and spears" - is an absolute phrase in which "Method" is a noun and nested prepositional phrase, "to protect warriors against enemy arrows and spears", modifies "Method"

AjiteshArun... Could you help in this regard

Hi DmitryFarber,

Could you please share your opinion on the issue raised ?. Why cannot we treat "method" as an abstract noun capturing the essence of action of the sentence before ","

Hello abhishekmayank,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, even if we consider "a method to protect..." an absolute phrase, the sentence still wouldn't make sense; the fact that animal-hide shields with wooden frames were essential items of military equipment can not logically be said to be a method for doing anything. A method is course of action; the action of the shields being essential items of military equipment is simply a statement of fact.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team

-> "animal-hide shields" are not a "method". It is illogical to call them a "method to protect"

Eliminate Option A.



-> Same as in Option A. "animal-hide shields" is illogically referred to as a "method"

Eliminate Option B



-> "protecting" modifies the noun "animal-hide shields". Makes sense.

Lets keep Option C



-> "as a protection" does not modify "military equipment".

Eliminate Option D



-> "comma" + "to verb" is creating a comma splice (connecting 2 independent clauses without "semi-colon" or "comma" + FANBOYS conjunction)

Eliminate Option E

So Option C is our answer

GMATNinja

Could you please tell why option E - " to protect " is wrong.
Could the reasoning be -- > phrase followed by comma should be a modifier, which can't be an infinitive.
Or may be that infinitive are used for defining the purpose of the main verb, however it is being used as
a descriptive phrase of the noun.