Galileo was convinced that natural phenomena, as manifestations of the laws of physics, would appear the same to someone on the deck of a ship moving smoothly and uniformly through the water as a person standing on land.

(A) water as a

(B) water as to a

(C) water; just as it would to

(D) water, as it would to the

(E) water; just as to the

Request Expert Reply:
Hi honorable experts,
MartyTargetTestPrep, GMATNinja, GMATGuruNY, AjiteshArun, VeritasPrepHailey, BrightOutlookJenn,
I've two queries in this question.
Q1:
Is there any ellipsis word like 'appear' after the word 'would' both in choice C and D?

Q2:
People says that 'it' refers back to 'phenomena' in choice C and D logically. But as 'it' is singular and 'phenomena' is plural they don't match. My question is: how do people know that 'phenomena' is plural? So far I know that GMAC keeps a hint to understand either the pronoun is singular or plural. Unfortunately, I did not get any hints for this question .
Can you share your thought, please?
Thanks in advanced..

I'm eagerly expecting feedback from my honorable experts! Appreciating your help, experts.

Galileo was convinced that natural phenomena, as manifestations of the laws of physics, would appear the same to someone on the deck of a ship moving smoothly and uniformly through the water as a person standing on land.

A. water as a

B. water as to a

C. water; just as it would to

D. water, as it would to the

E. water; just as to the

ANS :

CHOICE A:

Incorrect:
The sentence has the parallelism and the idiom errors

CHOICE B:

Correct:
The two objects compared here “to someone” and “to a person” are now parallel to each other. This also rectifies the idiom error.

CHOICE C

Incorrect:
1) Semi-colon joins an Independent Clause with a Dependent Clause.
2) Singular pronoun “it” has been used to refer to plural noun “phenomena”.

CHOICE D

Incorrect:
This choice repeats the pronoun error spotted in Choice C.

CHOICE E

Incorrect:
Semicolon should be used to join two independent clause. Here, what follows semicolon is a fragment as it does not have a subject-verb pair.

hope this helps .