altairahmad wrote:
Hi
daagh GMATNinja egmat Souvik EMPOWERgmatVerbalI have a question regarding option D.
(D)
because of moisture that was exhaled by tourists
raising the humidity within them to levels so high as to make the salt from the stone
crystallizeIsn't the verb-ing modifier 'raising' incorrect ? It is being used as noun modifier where as it should be as a verb modifier ?
Typically, when we see NOUN + VERB-ing, with no comma in between, the VERB-ing modifier will describe the preceding noun. For example, "The
children laughing at Tim did not appreciate that he was still in his first semester of clown college." In this case "laughing" describes the "children." The kids are laughing at the clown-in-training. Makes sense.
In (D) we have the following: "moisture that was exhaled by
tourists raising the humidity..." now it sounds as though "raising" is modifying tourists. It's not logical to write that the
tourists are raising the humidity. Rather, it's the moisture that's doing so.
If you're not satisfied that this is enough to eliminate (D) (and you should be!) there's another meaning problem: (D) makes it sound as though the chambers were closed because of moisture
itself; that doesn't make sense - if they were closed because of the presence of moisture, they'd never open! Rather, the chambers were closed because the moisture raised the humidity so high that salt was crystalizing and fungus was growing. Put another way, it was the
consequences of the moisture that caused the problem. (E) conveys this more logical meaning.
Last, as
RashedVai notes, there's a parallelism issue as well. Here's (D): "make the
salt from the stone crystallize and
fungus was growing...." "Salt from the stone crystallize" isn't parallel to "fungus was growing"
Contrast this construction with (E): "
salt from the stone was crystallizing and
fungus was growing..." Now we have a nice parallel construction: "X was VERB-ing and Y was VERB-ing.
I hope that helps!