Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if

Hi GMATNinja,
Could you help me to clarify why does the sentence use 'miss' instead of 'misses' in 'is likely to make an executive miss signs'? I thought executive is the one misses the signs of troubles, so I went C from E. Please help me Thank you.

Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.


A. Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

B. An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that worked well in the past, makes missing signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting ones likely when they do appear.

C. An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past.

D. Executives' being heavily committed to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes them likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting them when they do appear.

E. Being heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that has worked well in the past, is likely to make an executive miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

OG16 SC110

Hi GMATNinja AndrewN

Why can't "IT" in option A act as a placeholder pronoun?

"It" can be used as you described, as it is in the following example.

The telescope makes it easy to see details of faraway objects.

We can confirm that "it" is used logically by substituting the infinitive for "it."

The telescope makes to see details of faraway objects easy.

However, "it" does not work logically in that way in this instance, as we can see by substituting the infinitive for "it."

Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action makes to miss signs of incipient trouble likely.

Since that version is not logical, we can't really say that "it" is used logically.

This is one of the OG questions that causes the most trouble, partly because a lot of GMAT test-takers have an (occasionally incorrect) impulse to automatically eliminate any answer choice with the word "being."

But we'll get to that. Let's take these buggers in order:


That second "it" is the big problem here: "makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble..." I suppose that "it" could refer to "heavy commitment" or "course of action", but neither of those would make any sense. (A) is gone.


This is fairly subtle, but the subject doesn't make a whole lot of sense with the main verb here. "An executive... makes missing signs of incipient trouble... likely when they do appear." The pronoun "they" is OK, but it doesn't make logical sense to say that "an executive makes missing signs of trouble likely..." Also, I see no good reason use "ones" here -- in theory, "ones" would refer to very specific signs of trouble, and there's no good reason to use "ones" when a simple "them" would work. (B) is gone.


The "it" is a problem here: "it" generally refers to the nearest singular noun. In this case, "it" would seem to refer to "trouble," and that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. "Course of action" would work, but that's much farther back in the sentence.

To be fair, ambiguous pronouns aren't always wrong on the GMAT, so if you want to be conservative, you could keep (C) for now. But as we'll see in a moment, (E) is a much better option.


"Them" is trying to refer back to a possessive pronoun, "executives'", and that's wrong on the GMAT. Non-possessive pronouns (they, them, he, she, it) can't refer back to possessive nouns on the GMAT. So (D) is gone.


There are lots of pronoun issues in the other answer choices, but we're all good with (E): the ambiguous "it" we saw in (C) isn't here at all, and "them" and "they" very clearly refer to "signs of incipient trouble." The subject "being heavily committed to a course of action" works nicely with the main verb phrase ("is likely to make an executive miss signs of trouble..."), so (E) is an upgrade from (B).

That leaves "being" as the only reasonable objection to (E). But "being" is absolutely fine here: it's just a noun, also known as a gerund in this case. "Being" is no different than any other gerund. So (E) is our answer.

Please see last Monday's Topic of the Week for more on gerunds and other "-ing" words on the GMAT: https://gmatclub.com/forum/experts-topi ... 39780.html.

'Being heavily committed' should directly modifies the ' Executive'? should't it?
for the same reason i cancelled E out.

GMATNinja Thanks for this insight. Small tips here and there seem like they can move oceans on test day.

How do we recognize whether being is a 'gerund'? Are there any ways to identify that? Whenever I read 'being' or any gerund for that matter, most of the time they just seem like verbs to me.

how do we know that second IT in option 2 is not a dummy pronoun?

Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

Hello experts,

I wanted to ask can the second "it" not be a placeholder pronoun in option (A)? Does it necessarily need to have an antecedent (which makes it ambiguous) ?

Thanks in advance.

Can we eliminate (A), (D) from using "makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble"?
Does "make + noun + likely to verb" grammatically correct?

Can we eliminate (B) from using "makes missing".
Does "make + gerund" grammatically correct?

GMATNinja why can't 'it' in A refer back to executives?