siddyj94 wrote:
mikemcgarry chetan2u Can you please help me with my doubt of why the answer is
:A: because FOSSILS are plural and in option A it is clearly violating the S-V Agreement with
:WAS:Thanks in advance.
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 CorrectionDoes all this make sense?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)