In her later poems, Phyllis Wheatley's blending of solar imagery, Jude

In her later poems, Phyllis Wheatley's blending of solar imagery, Judeo-Christian thought and figures, and the images she borrowed from ancient classicism suggesting her range and depth of influences, not the least of which is her African heritage.


(A) the images she borrowed from ancient classicism suggesting

(B) borrowing images from ancient classicism, suggests

(C) she borrowed images from ancient classicism, which suggests

(D) images borrowed from ancient classicism suggests

(E) images that she borrowed from ancient classicism, suggesting

In the non underlined part, is " in her later poems, Phyllis wheatley's blending" right? shouldn't it be for example: "Phyllis Wheatly blends solar imagery..." instead of Phyllis Wheatly's?

One key to this question is figuring out what, exactly, needs to be parallel. The underlined portion starts immediately after the parallelism trigger "and" -- so we'll focus most our energy there. (For more on parallelism -- including some examples that are much tougher than this one -- check out our YouTube webinar on parallelism and meaning.)


The parallelism in (A) gives us a list of three things: "...Wheatley's blending of solar imagery, Judeo-Christian thought and figures, and the images she borrowed..." That's reasonable enough: she blended those three things together. So I think the parallelism is OK.

Trouble is, we don't really have a legitimate sentence in (A). To have a full sentence, you need an independent clause -- basically, a subject and a verb. The subject is "blending", but there's no verb "performed" by the subject. "Suggesting" isn't a verb here, since it isn't preceded by a form of "to be." (More on "-ing" words here.) So (A) is gone.


In (B), "and" is followed by "borrowing", so we need to find something that's parallel to "borrowing." It has to be "blending", right? Superficially, that's not bad: "...Wheatley's blending of solar imagery... and borrowing images from ancient classicism..."

But then what the heck is the phrase "Judeo-Christian thought and figures" doing here? I can't make any sense of it at all. It isn't part of a list in (B), and it doesn't logically modify "solar imagery." So on that basis alone, (B) is out.


This one has all sorts of problems. For starters, there's a straightforward, classic modifier error. The phrase "which suggests her range and depth of influences" seems to modify "ancient classicism", and that makes no sense at all. You could argue that the phrase beginning with "which" modifies "images from ancient classicism", but then there's a subject-verb issue. If you're in a hurry, that's enough to wipe out (C).

But there's also a broader structural problem with the sentence. "Phyllis Wheatley's blending of solar imagery, Judeo-Christian thought and figures, and she borrowed images from ancient classicism..." Huh? The subject of the sentence is "Wheatley's blending" again, but it never actually performs a verb.


(D) seems to fix all of our problems. The parallelism works, much as it does in (A): "...Wheatley's blending of solar imagery, Judeo-Christian thought and figures, and images borrowed from ancient classicism..." That's a perfectly legit list of three different things (nouns) that she blended together. And the subject-verb agreement makes sense, too: "... Wheatley's blending [of three things] suggests her depth and range of influences..." So the subject actually has a verb that makes sense in (D). Let's keep it.


I'd be a little bit happier with (E) if it said "images borrowed from ancient classicism" instead of "images that she borrowed from ancient classicism." It just seems like a waste of words, but that's not necessarily wrong. The parallelism is basically OK: the list still consists of three parallel nouns.

The trouble is, the main subject ("Wheatley's blending") doesn't actually "perform" a verb, since "suggesting" isn't a verb here. It's the same problem as in (A). So (E) can be eliminated, and (D) is the best answer.

So in (B), can't "borrowing images" be a noun parallel with other 2 nouns in the list?

Hi lakshya14,

There are multiple reasons to take option B out. Here is the sentence that B leads to:

... Phyllis Wheatley's blending of (a) solar imagery, (b) Judeo-Christian thought and figures, and (c) borrowing images from ancient classicism, suggests her range...

There is a list here (of three things that were blended), but it makes no sense to say that she blended borrowing images with solar imagery and Judeo-Christian thought and figures.

The comma before suggests is also a problem.

There is a list here (of three things that were blended), but it makes no sense to say that she blended borrowing images with solar imagery and Judeo-Christian thought and figures.

Got your point , but "suggests" in (B) must be a modifier problem?

borrowing can not be used as adjective to images? e.g. sewing machine from ancient classicism , frying pan from ancient classicism, beautiful images from ancient classicism and hence borrowing images from ancient classicism

please suggest

GMATNinja egmat AjiteshArun

Hi itsSKR,

That's a very good question.

Yes, borrowing is capable of acting as an adjective. It would still not be correct, though, because borrowing as an adjective would mean that the images are doing the borrowing.

Borrowed images ~ images that are borrowed
Borrowing images ~ images that are borrowing

Another example: tracking cookies ~ cookies that "do" tracking

In her later poems, Phyllis Wheatley's blending of solar imagery, Judeo-Christian thought and figures, and the images she borrowed from ancient classicism suggesting her range and depth of influences, not the least of which is her African heritage.


(A) the images she borrowed from ancient classicism suggesting

(B) borrowing images from ancient classicism, suggests

(C) she borrowed images from ancient classicism, which suggests

(D) images borrowed from ancient classicism suggests

(E) images that she borrowed from ancient classicism, suggesting

GMATNinja EducationAisle I notice that this sentence ONLY has pronouns (possessive and non-possessive). But shouldn't there be at least one antecedent?