Fossils of a whale that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by palaeontologists.

ANSWER IS A
The subject of the sentence is "FOSSILS" which is plural, so the use of a corresponding plural verb "have" is must.

A. that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have
CORRECT:- correct verb "have" and correct simple past tense "beached". "that" correctly refers to the "fossils of the whale"

B. that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and then was subsequently butchered by hominids has
WRONG:- has is incorrect tense

C. that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago, which was subsequently butchered by hominids, has
WRONG:- has is incorrect tense. placement of "which" is incorrect. Here "which" is modifying million years instead of "whale"

D. having been beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and subsequently butchered by hominids, have
WRONG:- "ing+been+past" is incorrect . Simple past is sufficient

E. having beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and then subsequently were butchered by hominids have
WRONG:- "ing+past" is incorrect . Simple past is sufficient.
Meaning change :- The fossils were not butchered. The whale was butchered and then the whale become a fossil after thousands of years.



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Dear siddyj94,

I'm happy to respond.

With all due respect, my friend, I think you have gotten lost in the architecture of the sentence, because you have paired a noun with a verb even though they are at different levels of the sentence. Here's (A), with the big noun=modifying clause in green.

Fossils = noun, plural, main subject
of a whale = prepositional phrase, modifies "fossils"
that = relative pronoun, begins a large noun-modifying relative clause, targeting the singular noun "whale"
Because the target noun, "whale," is singular, the relative pronoun "that" is singular, and all the verbs in the relative clause referring to it have to be singular
//beached on an African shore more than a million years ago = first branch of parallelism, singular verb inside clause
and
//was subsequently butchered by hominids = second branch of parallelism, singular verb inside clause
have been recovered = main verb of sentence, with plural subject "fossils"
by paleontologists.

You see, my friend, the GMAT loves to nest structures inside each other, and it can put parallelism at any level. It's very important, with each and every verb, to know where it is situated in the architecture of the sentence overall. See:
Nested Grammatical Structures on the GMAT Sentence Correction

Does all this make sense?
Mike
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Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test Prep





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Fossils of a whale that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by paleontologists.

A. that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have - CORRECT as SV agreement, Subject Fossils agrees in number with plural have

B. that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and then was subsequently butchered by hominids has - Usage of has is incorrect , SV agreement error as Fossils is Plural. Also then usage is incorrect as redundant here

C. that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago, which was subsequently butchered by hominids, has - Usage of has is incorrect , SV agreement error as Fossils is Plural

D. having been beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and subsequently butchered by hominids, have - Having been" is incorrect here. Participle cannot be used as it is not parallel to butchered

E. having beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and then subsequently were butchered by hominids have - "Having been" is incorrect here. Participle cannot be used as it is not parallel to butchered. Second point what was butchered? Of course it is the whale that was butchered hence usage of were is incorrect
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