In 1984 medical researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities concl

"that sedentary life-styles lead to heart and lung diseases that shorten lives" - is a subordinate "that" clause.
Subject - sedentary life-styles
Verb - lead

"that shorten lives" - is a modifier modifying "heart and lung diseases"

So the structure of the clause is "A lead to B"
B is "heart and lung diseases that shorten lives"

The basic structure of the sentence comes out when you ignore all modifiers.

Here it is
"researchers ... concluded that ... life-styles lead to ... diseases..., recommending middle-aged people to undertake exercise"

The subject of the subordinate clause is closer to "recommending".

Hi KarishmaB

Hope you're keeping well
Got a query regarding subjunctive here. In A

A: "strongly recommending middle-aged people to undertake some form of regular exercise."

Ignoring other issues with it, can we say: it is wrong because it violates subjunctive?
in other words, would the following be correct in terms of subjunctive?

"strongly recommending middle-aged people to undertake some form of regular exercise"

Regards

The structure of subjunctive could be:
"Researchers recommend that people undertake ..."
or
"Researchers recommend people undertake ..." (omit that)

"Researchers recommend people to undertake..." is not very natural though some cultures do use it.

That said, the use of comma -ing verb is not correct here since researchers concluding and researchers recommending are separate actions. "recommending" does not modify (talk more about) concluding. You need to use "and" to join them.

ok thanks KarishmaB
takeaway: <-ing> - when used as participle, does not invoke subjunctive

No, that is not the takeaway. The problem is that you cannot use a participle here.

But if we use "and" (as in E), it eliminates causal relation required in the sentence. Otherwise, it seems like the two statement are independent.

daagh GMATNinja

1. Does -ing modifer / present participle modifier always and only modify the immediate preceding clause ? Be it dependent or independent clause ?

In this case, will it be the main clause with medical researchers as the subject or the 2nd subordinate clause with sedentary lifestyles as the subject.

2. Is there a third subordinate clause with 'that' as the subject pointing to 'heart and lung diseases' and shorten as verb ?

isnt the "They" in answer E ambiguous? Medical researchers? or Universities?

EducationAisle egmat why can't "strongly recommending" modify the previous clause "researchers... concluded" thereby conveying that Researchers concluded X and as a result recommended Y


The reason I eliminated (E) is because I didn't see the need to start an IC. Clearly the recommendation is related to the previous information, So I didn't see any reason to start an IC

waihoe520
We don't have to treat "they" as ambiguous unless there is genuine room for understanding. "Researchers" is the only plural noun in the sentence that can make a recommendation. None of the other nouns can do that--not universities, and certainly not lifestyles or diseases--so we don't have a truly ambiguous pronoun. It also helps that "researchers" is our subject, so when we see "and they," we should default to referring back to "researchers" unless the sentence gives us a cue to do otherwise.

Hoozan
First, A has an idiom problem. We can recommend something, or we can recommend THAT someone DO something, but we can't recommend someone TO DO something. Also, it doesn't work well to use "recommending" as a modifier here. It doesn't clearly modify "concluded," since it's a completely separate action that does not show how the researchers concluded something or describe a direct logical consequence of their conclusion. It's really its own action, hence the new clause in E. It also doesn't help that we have another full clause after "concluded," making it tougher to refer back clearly to that verb.

A separate note on E: try to avoid crossing anything out just because it uses a construction that doesn't seem to be required. The wrong answers should be actively wrong, and the right answer may often do things that seem unnecessary or less than ideal.

Thank you Payal for the explanantion.
If that is the case, can't 'that' (referring to diseases) be the subject of "recommending"? I know that it is still wrong, but how do you decide when you have multiple nested clauses?

I am sure that the second sentence according to option E would be separate sentence, so it can not be the right answer choice. I believe separate sentences should be divided by full stop not by "and".

Update, I was wrong. independent clauses must be connected with "and".

Posted from my mobile device

in other gmat problem , "they" in choice E is considered redundant and the choice is wrong. but "they" is inferior, but not incorrect.

the pronoun in the second clause can be considered redundant if the first clause is short. if the first clause is long, I think, the pronoun should be inserted.

GMATNinja, please please please help in this.

Just sharing my two cents here. It's a good question mixed with modifier and parallelism errors

In 1984 medical researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities concluded that sedentary life-styles lead to heart and lung diseases that shorten lives, strongly recommending middle-aged people to undertake some form of regular exercise.

A. strongly recommending middle-aged people to - here it seems like "recommending" (verb-ing modifier ) is modifying "sedentary life style" which is not the intended meaning. Hence, incorrect

B. strongly recommending that middle-aged people should - If you look closely "recommend" is a subjunctive verb and whenever you use subjunctive verb, avoid using "should" along with it. Grammatically Incorrect, hence out

C. and strongly recommended for middle-aged people to - apart from idiom error i see a parallelism error here, to make it sound grammatically correct it should be Universities concluded that bla bla and strongly recommended that (use of subjunctive verb is appropriate here). Hence, incorrect

D. and their strong recommendation was for middle-aged people to - same as C

E. and they strongly recommended that middle-aged people - Voila! we have found the correct answer. Here, they refer to researchers and is free of errors.