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(A) indicate their development of a Harappan writing system, the use of
A bunch of different problems come from the use of the phrase “indicate their development.” First,
“the discovery [of stuff]…” is the subject for the verb “indicate.” And that’s wrong: it would have to be “the discovery…
indicates.”
Second, “their” must refer to a plural noun, and our only real options are “inscribed shards” or “excavators” – neither of which developed the Harappan writing system.
There’s a third issue, and it’s more subtle: the sentence is much clearer if we include the word “that” after indicate. Why? Well, here are two stripped-down versions of the sentence, one with “that” and one without:
- Without “that”: ”…the discovery indicated the development of a writing system… occurred many decades earlier…”
- With “that”: ”…the discovery indicated that the development of a writing system… occurred many decades earlier…”
That second sentence is much clearer, right? The sentence is trying to say that “the discovery indicated THAT {something occurred}” – so we’re much better off with “that” in the sentence.
So we have tons of reasons to ditch (A).
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(B) indicate that the development of a Harappan writing system, using
(B) has the same subject-verb error as (A): “the discovery… indicate” is wrong.
The parallelism is also a problem here. In some answer choices, we have “the discovery indicates that the development…, the use…, and the standardization… occurred many decades earlier…” Cool, that gives us three parallel nouns, and it makes sense to say that the three things all happened many decades earlier.
But in (B), “the use” has been changed to “using” – so now it’s a modifier, suggesting that “inscribed seals impressed into clay for marking ownership” were used to actually develop the writing system. And that doesn’t make much sense, since the seals that marked ownership didn't have anything to do with the development of the writing system.
So again, we have plenty of reasons to eliminate (B).
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(C) indicates that their development of a Harappan writing system, using
(C) has two familiar problems: first, “their” doesn’t make any sense. See the description of answer choice (A) for more on this issue. Second, the modifier “using…” doesn’t make sense, as described under answer choice (B).
So (C) is out, too.
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(D) indicates the development of a Harappan writing system, their use of
(D) also recycles some errors from the other answer choices. For starters, I’m not sure that “their” makes sense here, since it logically needs to refer to “Harappan”, but “Harappan” is just an adjective – not actually a plural noun. As we explained in answer choice (A), the only plural nouns earlier in the sentence are “excavators” and “shards” – neither of which would make any sense at all.
Plus, we’re much better off if the word “indicates” is followed by “that” – see the explanation of answer choice (A) for more on that issue, too.
So (D) is out, and I really really hope that (E) doesn’t suck, or else we’ll be starting over.
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(E) indicates that the development of a Harappan writing system, the use of
Oh goody, it looks like we’re OK. The subject-verb agreement (“the discovery indicates”) is correct, “indicates” is correctly followed by “that” (see answer choice (A) for more on that issue), and the parallelism is spot-on.
So (E) is our best answer.