In ancient Thailand, much of the local artisans' creative energy was

Hi, there! I'm happy to help with this.

Original sentence: In ancient Thailand, much of the local artisans’ creative energy was expended for the creation of Buddha images and when they constructed and decorated the temples that enshrined them.

First of all, notice the idiom with the verb "to expend." When I expend my energies, with the intended result of giving my energy to X, we say that "I expend my energies on X", not "I expend my energies for X." That eliminates answer choice A.

Notice also, what the original sentence is trying to do is construct a valid parallel structure. The "local artisan's creative energy" went to two places: (a) "creation of Buddha images", and (b) the work they did constructing & decorating temples. The correct sentence should have a valid parallel structure between those two elements. This is another flaw of answer (A) --- "the creation" vs. "they constructed and decorated". Not parallel.

Answer (C) repeats that problem: "the creation" vs. "constructing and decorating". Not parallel.

Answer (E) repeats that problem: "the creating" vs. "construction and decoration". Not parallel.


That narrows the choice down to (B) vs. (D).

Notice that (D) is very wordy; it has an indirect inactive structure (from "artisans expended energy on X", active, to "X accounted for artisans energy", passive and weak).

(B) gets the idiom ("expended on") correct; it gets the parallel structure correct; and it's a direct & active formulation of the information. Yeah! This is our best choice.

Does that made sense? Please let me know if you have any questions.

Mike

Note, however, that option B is not perfectly parallel. It lacks a "the" between "on" and "construction and decoration". Hence, there could have been even a better option.

B) much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images and on construction and decoration of the temples in which they were enshrined.

Could someone please explain the reason/s why I should discard option D?

Thank you.

2 reasons:

1. "And" and "also" are redundant.
2. "constructing and decorating the temples enshrining them" is a subject without any verb.

I have a question regarding the option C. As much as the idiomatic construction of "as well as" is incorrect, I have confusion whether the term "creating" is actually a simple or complex gerund. Because if it is a simple gerund (overlooking the faraway "of"), then it certainly cannot be parallel with the two action nouns: construction and decoration. But, if it is a complex gerund (considering the "of" to be common with "decoration"), then it certainly is very much parallel with the action nouns. So, if we ignore the "as well as" part, can the discussed reason be the "sole" criteria for eliminating an answer choice? (If at all the word "creating" is a complex gerund). Even though complex gerunds can be parallel to the action nouns, is it preferable to convert all terms into action nouns?


Please help, thanks in advance!

The biggest issue in (A) is the mess of pronouns toward the end of the sentence. That first “they” logically needs to refer to “local artisans”, but that raises two problems. First, “Buddha images” is the closest plural noun, so that raises a potential ambiguity issue. Second, “local artisans” is actually a possessive noun here, and in general on the GMAT, it’s not ideal to have a non-possessive pronoun (“they”) refer back to a possessive noun (artisans’).

If you need a refresher on pronouns, feel free to check out this YouTube webinar. To be fair, pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule, so you could keep (A) if you really wanted to be conservative. But in this case, I think we can agree that the pronouns are legitimately confusing, or at least we can agree that there are better options below.

And if that isn’t enough for you, there’s arguably a little parallelism issue in (A): “…the local artisans' creative energy was expended for the creation of Buddha images and when they constructed and decorated…” I’m not 100% certain that it’s WRONG, exactly: I guess it’s OK to say that “the local artisans’ creative energy was expended… when they constructed and decorated the temples…” But technically speaking, “for the creation” is a prepositional phrase, and “when they constructed” is not.

If you’re not convinced by that last paragraph, no worries: the pronoun thing is probably enough to allow us to get rid of (A), particularly since we’ll have better options in a moment.


This one seems much better! The pronoun “they” logically need to refer to “Buddha images”, and there’s no real reason to worry about ambiguity here: “Buddha images” is really the only plausible plural referent, since “local artisans’” is possessive, and “temples” isn’t really an option, since “they” couldn’t plausibly refer back to temples in the phrase “temples in which they were enshrined.”

The parallelism is also much better here: “much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images and on construction and decoration…” Yup, that’s parallel.

So we can keep (B).


(C) isn’t all that different from (B), but it does warp the parallelism a little bit. Let’s put the key part of the sentence side-by-side so we can see the differences:

(B) “much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images and on construction and decoration…”
(C)“much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images as well as constructing and decoration…”

(C) isn’t totally awful, but I see absolutely no reason to use “as well as” here, when a nice, simple “and” does the trick. Plus, (B) is parallel throughout: the artisans’ energy was expended on the creation, construction, and decoration. That’s nice. In (C), it gets wonky: we have “on the creation”, but then “constructing and decoration.” That’s less nice.

Again, I wouldn’t argue that (C) is WRONG, exactly. But it’s clearly inferior to (B), so we can eliminate (C).


This is a confusing mess. Basically, we can’t make any sense of the parallelism: “and” is followed by “constructing and decorating”, but I can’t figure out what “constructing and decorating” is parallel to. “Creating” is structurally similar, but if we’re trying to make “creating” parallel to “constructing and decorating”, then why aren’t all of them at the beginning of the sentence?

Plus, we could argue that “them” is more confusing than in (B). “Them” logically refers back to “images of Buddha”, which is waaaaay back in the beginning of the sentence in (D). The antecedent is much closer to the pronoun in (B). Again, pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule on the GMAT, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue that (D) is WRONG solely because of the pronoun – but the pronoun gives us another small reason to prefer (B) over (D).


We can make the same argument about the pronoun “them” in (E) as we did in (D): it isn’t WRONG for “them” to reach all the way back to “Buddha images”, but it isn’t ideal, either.

More importantly, the meaning of the sentence is warped by the phrase “as well as construction and decoration.” It sounds like the sentence is trying to say that “the creating of Buddha images” accounted for several things: “the local artisans’ creative energy” and also “the construction and decoration of the temples.” And that doesn’t make sense: the creating of Buddha images didn’t “account for the construction and decoration of temples.”

Plus, I suppose you could also argue that “the creating of Buddha images” is a not-so-ideal use of a gerund. There’s no need to use the gerund “creating” when the noun “creation” is available to us. Again, I don’t think that “the creating of Buddha images” is WRONG, exactly, but it’s one more small reason to feel good about eliminating (E).

So (B) is our answer.

I have a doubt related to the verb-ed form of expended.
Question: How "was expended" is used in this sentence?
If this sentence is in the passive voice and expended is past participle, how come person responsible for doing the actions is before "was expended"?

In ancient Thailand, much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended for the creation of Buddha images and when they constructed and decorated the temples that enshrined them.


(A) much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended for the creation of Buddha images and when they constructed and decorated the temples that enshrined them

(B) much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images and on construction and decoration of the temples in which they were enshrined

(C) much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images as well as constructing and decoration of the temples in which they were enshrined

(D) creating images of Buddha accounted for much of the local artisans' creative energy, and also constructing and decorating the temples enshrining them

(E) the creating of Buddha images accounted for much of the local artisans' creative energy as well as construction and decoration of the temples that enshrined them

In ancient Thailand, much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended for the creation of Buddha images and when they constructed and decorated the temples that enshrined them.


(A) much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended for the creation of Buddha images and when they constructed and decorated the temples that enshrined them

(B) much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images and on construction and decoration of the temples in which they were enshrined

(C) much of the local artisans' creative energy was expended on the creation of Buddha images as well as constructing and decoration of the temples in which they were enshrined

(D) creating images of Buddha accounted for much of the local artisans' creative energy, and also constructing and decorating the temples enshrining them

(E) the creating of Buddha images accounted for much of the local artisans' creative energy as well as construction and decoration of the temples that enshrined them

I'll be honest: in the (*cough*) ridiculous number of years since I first started teaching/taking the GMAT, I've never given a moment's thought to the difference between simple and complex gerunds. I just can't see any reason why we would use a gerund (any gerund!) in the phrase "the creating of", when it would be much more elegant to say "the creation of." Why use a kooky gerund phrase when a nice, normal noun is available to us?

In general, I get nervous whenever we try to turn a very fine nuance of grammar into a hard-and-fast GMAT rule. Most things that we sometimes describe as GMAT "rules" (pronoun ambiguity, for example, or the modifier "touch rule") end up having exceptions. And since the GMAT has never published an authoritative, comprehensive list of SC rules, we have to wonder which things can even be reasonably described as "rules" in the first place.

And yes: that's totally maddening.

I agree that if two actions are parallel, it would generally be PREFERABLE to use two action nouns, instead of a gerund and an action noun. But the GMAT avoided making that the SOLE issue in this question, interestingly. And it wouldn't shock me to see a correct answer that includes an action noun that's parallel to a gerund, even though I can't think of any cases of it.

Bottom line: your thinking seems correct to me, but just be careful not to get TOO mechanical with "rules" that might not actually be real RULES. This particular question is typical of the GMAT: there are two issues that make (B) better than (C). So even if you're not 100% certain about either issue individually, the correct answer is pretty unambiguous.

I know that wasn't the most satisfying answer ever, but I hope that it helps, anyway!