Almost 3 years after the Federal Reserve introduced monetary

I'm happy to help with this.

Almost 3 years after the Federal Reserve introduced monetary measures to artificially support the financial markets and institutions for the greater good of the economy by providing large capital injections to large financial institutions, four investment banks have been investigated by securities regulators, finding that all four consistently misused funds, many banks deteriorated, and that more than half of the banks did not use the funds for the greater economy, and instead used the money to fuel their risky financial bets.

First, I will say --- I am not particular impressed with either this question or this source. Notice, for example, the split infinitive in the prompt ("to artificially support") ---- that's something you will never see on the real GMAT.

Some issues in the underlined section of the prompt -----
1) The participle "finding" would, in this construction, apply to the subject "many banks", which does not make sense here.
2) three parallel clauses, and only two of them have "that"
//that all four consistently misused funds,
//many banks deteriorated,
and
//that more than half of the banks did not use
We could have one "that" at the beginning, or a single "that" at the beginning of each clause, but we can't have "that" at the first & third clauses, skipping the second.
(A) is clearly incorrect.

(B) an investigation by securities regulators of four investment banks have found all four consistently misusing funds, that many banks deteriorated, with more than half the banks not using
Failure of parallelism ---- "misusing (participle) .... that many banks deteriorated (full clause) ... banks not using (participle)." This is a disaster. This is incorrect.

(C) an investigation of four investment banks by securities regulators has found that all four consistently misused funds, that many banks deteriorated, and that more than half the banks did not use
No obvious problems. Correct parallelism. This is acceptable.

(D) four investment banks were investigated by securities regulators who found all four misusing funds, with many banks deteriorating, and more than half the banks did not use
Failure of parallelism ----- "all four misusing funds (participle), with many banks deteriorating (prepositional phrase), and .... banks did not use (full clause) ...." Another parallelism disaster. This is incorrect.

(E) an investigation by securities regulators has found that, of four investment banks, all four consistently misused funds, that many banks deteriorated, with more than half the banks not using
Another failure of parallelism --- (that clause) + (that clause) + (prepositional phrase) ---- this is incorrect.

The only acceptable answer possible is (C), the OA.

Does all this make sense?
Mike
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Hii.
It was a lengthy question.
First understand the meaning of the sentence.
After 3 years of something, y happens. Result:
i) four banks consistently misused funds.
ii)many banks deteriorated.
iii) more than half of the banks did not use the money for greater economy but for their self interest.
We have to look for this meaning in a correctly written sentence.
Choice A merges two ICs without any proper conjunction. Moreover, the usage of "four banks were investigated" following the clause "almost 3 years after the bla bla bla" implies a different meaning.
B has SVA issue. "investigation" is singular.
D and E change the meaning. In addition to this, D is not parallel.
Regards.

Hello Mike, Would you mind clearing my doubt?

(C) an investigation of four investment banks by securities regulators has found that all four consistently misused funds, that many banks deteriorated, and that more than half the banks did not use

In this option i thought how can an investigation find something, it must be human to do so?

Is my observation valid in this case?

Regards
Atal Pandit

Dear Atal,
I'm sorry to say, but I think you are splitting hairs too much. If the noun were a concrete object, then yes, we could say --- a concrete object could not find anything: it must be a human. But here, the noun is "an investigation" --- that means, a bunch of people investigating. At no time is the investigation taking place that there aren't real human people doing the investigating. It's an irreducibly human action, so it most certainly can "find" things. Does this make sense?
Mike
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yes it is clear but i still look forward for some examples to polish my understanding.

kindly give some examples if possible..
thank You..

Dear Atalpanditgmat,
Sure, here are a few examples. First of all, in the OG13,
in SC #10, a "theory holds that..."
in SC #16, a "surge in new home sales ... suggests ...."
in SC #18, "the National Academy of Science has urged ..."
in SC #75, "cities are stressing the arts ..."
Those are a few examples in the OG of larger non-personal nouns taking personal actions.

It would also be perfectly acceptable to talk about ----
... an investigation has found ...
... an exploration of X has revealed ....
... experimentation with X has found ...
... a new understanding of X holds that ...

My friend, I am going to recommend that you make a regular practice of reading a good newspaper, such as the NYT or WSJ, or even better, the Economist Magazine.
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-reading-list/
In any sophisticated news source, you will see an abundance of phrasings just like these.

Does all this make sense?
Mike
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C must be the correct answer. It uses the parallel structure "that" in all the parts of the descriptors.
In D the major fault is it avoids parallelism...use should be written as using..
I believe entire question is just based on parallelism.

Consider kudos if my post helps!!!!

Archit

Hi Mike,

Correct me pls if I am wrong. In the not-underlined section, "instead" is not used properly.

Dear alphaseeker,
I'm happy to respond.

Here is the prompt sentence again:
Almost 3 years after the Federal Reserve introduced monetary measures to artificially support the financial markets and institutions for the greater good of the economy by providing large capital injections to large financial institutions, four investment banks have been investigated by securities regulators, finding that all four consistently misused funds, many banks deteriorated, and that more than half of the banks did not use the funds for the greater economy, and instead used the money to fuel their risky financial bets.
In this prompt, the word "instead" is used perfectly correct. Fundamentally, the word "instead" is an adverb, a verb or action modifier, and so can appear in many places in a sentence or clause. As you may understand, verb modifiers have many fewer restrictions on their placement, unlike noun modifier. This is a relatively sophisticated use of the word "instead" but it is perfectly correct.

My friend, if this sound odd to you, it means you are not reading enough. The only way you can develop an "ear" for sophisticated English is to read. See this blog:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2014/how-to-imp ... bal-score/

Does all this make sense?
Mike
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Thank you Mike, please bear in mind I am a non-native speaker..

I think I confused it with "instead of". I did not know that "instead" is an adverb. It is now clear to me. Thank you again.

Hi mikemcgarry

Can you demystify the structure of this sentence. I am not able to comprehend the structure of this sentence - doesn't look like two independent clauses are joined !

Regards,
SR

Dear solitaryreaper,
I'm happy to help. That sentence has only one independent clause.

Let's just look at version (C), the OA:
Almost 3 years after the Federal Reserve introduced monetary measures to artificially support the financial markets and institutions for the greater good of the economy by providing large capital injections to large financial institutions, an investigation of four investment banks by securities regulators has found that all four consistently misused funds, that many banks deteriorated, and that more than half the banks did not use the funds for the greater economy, and instead used the money to fuel their risky financial bets.

Once again, the split infinitive ("to artificially support") is an embarrassing gaffe for the authors of the question. We'll leave that aside. Here is how this sentence is organized

The word "after" is an subordinate conjunction that opens a dependent clause. What's tricky is that this subordinate conjunction is modified by an adverb phrase "almost three years," but this is perfectly acceptable. Here's the whole dependent clause:
Almost 3 years after the Federal Reserve introduced monetary measures to artificially support the financial markets and institutions for the greater good of the economy by providing large capital injections to large financial institutions . . .
Notice that this contains an infinitive of purpose ("to ... support") that contains a long string of prepositional phrases.
For more on infinitives of purpose, see:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2014/the-infini ... orrection/
For more on infinitive phrases, see:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/infinitive ... -the-gmat/

So all that, everything up to the first comma, is dependent clause. That by itself would not be a complete sentence.

After the comma, the main clause of the sentence begins.
"an investigation" = MAIN SUBJECT of sentence
"has found" = MAIN VERB of sentence

What's particularly interesting is that the direct object of the verb is a set of three substantive clauses in parallel. Substantive clauses, also known as noun clauses, are clauses that take the place of a noun. For more on these, see:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/substantiv ... -the-gmat/
Each one is a "that" clause that contains its own subject and verb:
1) that all four consistently misused funds
2) that many banks deteriorated
"and"
3) that more than half the banks did not use the funds for the greater economy, and instead used the money to fuel their risky financial bets

The last "that" clause features two verbs in parallel: "did not use . . . and instead used." This construction is 100% grammatically correct, but not necessarily the most elegant. I think a considerably more GMAT-like structure would be a "not . . but" parallelism:
that more than half the banks used the funds not for the greater economy, but for their risky financial bets.
That would be more concise, direct, and GMAT-like.

This question is in many ways far from the high standards of the GMAT. Here's a more GMAT-like question:
https://gmat.magoosh.com/questions/3586

Does all this make sense?
Mike
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Thanks a lot mikemcgarry !!

This is very informative

Just one last piece to cement my understanding.
Is it true that any subordinate conjunction can give rise to a grammatically correct dependent clause ? Or there is a list of a bona fide conjunctions that can only be used to frame dependent clauses.

Thanks in advance.

Regards
SR

Dear solitaryreaper,
I'm happy to respond. My friend, think about your question. The definition of a "subordinate conjunction" is "a word that introduces a dependent clause." If a word could not correctly introduce a dependent clause, it couldn't possibly be a subordinate conjunction. You can see a list of these here:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/top-six-gm ... orrection/

Dependent clauses can be introduced by either a subordinate conjunction or by a relative pronoun/adverb (who, what, that, which, how, why, whose, whom, etc. ) Both can start grammatically correct dependent clauses.
Mike
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this question is not too hard, test takers can use their ears to find the correct answer. C is clear and least awkward.

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