Lewis and Clark were not the first white men to cross the continent fr

Id say E.

ABC don't really complete the sentence the way it should be. the use of nor here is clearer than and.

When reading A,B, or C I had trouble trying to figure out what the sentence was really trying to say.

D: use of had is not needed.

Sorry for bringing this thread up, but i am unable to understand the errors here.

Experts can you kindly elucidate. My concerns are:

1. What is wrong with Option B ?
2. Is it a GMAT kind of question ?

I am a little confused here.

I thought nor should always be used with 'neither', but here we are using it with 'not'.

Is this correct? What other exceptions do we have for nor? Like, can it be used without 'Neither' or 'Not' as well?

Usually "nor" is used with "neither". However it is alright to use "nor" with various negatives such as "not", "never" etc. as in option E above.

I have never seen a car crash, nor do I intend to do so..... correct.
I have not completed my homework, nor have I prepared for the test..... correct.

if this question is from gmatprep, I want to know why A is wrong.

when the two ideas are the same, we use "nor" to emphasize the second idea. this is why E is correct. A is wrong because the two ideas similar if they are connected by "and" will become not related to each other.

yes, I am confuse, why a is wrong

the point of "comma+and" is a good point. but I think gmat will not test us this point only.

While joining two negative sentences, neither of which is done, OR is correct. Compare with the following logical

Given, X AND Y both are false:

The correct interpretation is: NOT (X AND Y) = (NOT Y) OR (NOT Y) = NOT X NOR Y........ (Or NOT is also same as NOR: NOT X NOR Y)
The wrong interpretation is: (NOT X) AND (NOT Y)...this implies that X AND Y both does not happen (but it is possible that either X or Y happens,while the other does not)

For example:
I ate an apple and I ate a banana.....correct
I did not eat an apple or I did not eat a banana.... correct
The second sentence can also be written as:
I did not eat an apple nor did I did eat a banana.... correct

But,
I did not eat an apple and I did not eat a banana... conveys a wrong meaning ( implies, I did not eat both, but it is possible that I ate any one of them.)

Similarly option A wrongly implies that L and C did not do both the things : being first and visiting places, but it is possible that they did any one of them. This is not the conveyed meaning. The intended meaning is that they did neither. Hence NOT X OR NOT Y (NOT X NOR Y) structure is required, and NOT X AND NOT Y structure is wrong. Hence A is wrong.

Hi,
In GMAT meaning and proper diction comes first . There is no strigent rules that nor should come with neither only. Though neither ...nor (paraller markers) is a general phrase and used to link nouns. Here option E is the most clear and apt answer. In other choices double negative changes the meaning and not correct.

Can you tell me why exactly is D wrong

D is incorrect because it uses past perfect instead of past. Past perfect tells us that an event occurred before an event in the past tense.

In this sentence, Lewis and Clark were (past tense) not the first white men to cross the continent. If we then say they had not visited (past perfect tense) places unseen/unmapped by native people, we're establishing a timeline — the past perfect event happened before the past event. So they visited these places that they weren't the first to see before they crossed the continent that they weren't the first to cross? If we're familiar with American history, we know that Lewis and Clark visited places as they crossed the continent. So both verbs should be in the same tense.

If we aren't so familiar with American history, we can look at parallelism: we're looking at two things Lewis and Clark did but weren't the first to do. In most cases, if two verbs have the same subject and are parallel to each other (any of our FANBOYS, including "nor", are classic ways to set up parallelism), they will have the same tense. So because we have past tense in the first part ("were") we want past tense in the second part ("did").

General rule: don't use past perfect unless you need to. Past perfect means something very specific, so if you aren't looking to create a timeline where one event occurs before another past event, stick to simple past.

Official Explanation

Correct Answer: E

The best answer is E. Being the second thing that Lewis and Clark did not do, the word nor is required. The first negative phrase is in the past simple, so the second one must be in past simple form as well.

Hello from the GMAT Club VerbalBot!

Thanks to another GMAT Club member, I have just discovered this valuable topic, yet it had no discussion for over a year. I am now bumping it up - doing my job. I think you may find it valuable (esp those replies with Kudos).

Want to see all other topics I dig out? Follow me (click follow button on profile). You will receive a summary of all topics I bump in your profile area as well as via email.