Harappa and Maya are examples of civilizations in which people

A) declined with the depletion of resources and never gained - refers of people
B) who declines in economy with the depletion of resources and who never gain - who is incorrect and tense error.
C) whose economies declined with the depletion of resources and never gained - whose is correct but we need something which shows the contrast between abundance and declined of resources
D) and their economies declined with the depletion of resources and never gained - Same as C
E) but whose economies declined with the depletion of resources and never gained - Correct. captures the correct contrast.

Kindly correct me if my logic is wrong or I am missing something.

egmat: If you could please vet my response and address my query.

Harappa and Maya are examples of civilizations
=> in which people experienced economic growth
=> => because of an abundance of natural resources,
declined with the depletion of resources and never gained prominence again.


A) declined with the depletion of resources and never gained
Declined acts as a modifier instead of verb and hence is not parallel to "gained"

B) who declines in economy with the depletion of resources and who never gain
who cannot be used for civilizations.

C) whose economies declined with the depletion of resources and never gained
whose refer incorrectly to natural resources. A proper connector is needed

D) and their economies declined with the depletion of resources and never gained

E) but whose economies declined with the depletion of resources and never gained

I was stuck between the choices D and E. Why is D wrong? Is it just because of the need of a "contrast"?

like others, i m also stuck between choice D & E.

Hi expert

I donot understand the use of whose in option E.
According to the relative pronoun rule , whose should refer to the closest possible noun .
I think there is an ambiguity in the use of whose as it can grammatically refer to both people and civilizations , though logically whose refers to civilizations

It can't be C bcoz we are separating two clauses with just comma whereas an "and" or "but" is needed.. Also in C , the third element of list is not parallel since it is not a clause.
Though to show contrast But will be a better option than And.

Hello kanishaksharma,

We hope this finds you well.

To provide a bit of clarity here, there is no parallelism error in Option C; in C, "never gained prominence again" is listed together with "declined with the depletion of resources"; the two are verb phrases that refer to the actions done by the noun "economies", meaning these are the elements must be parallel.

Remember, parallelism must be maintained between the elements of a sentence that play the same role within the sentence.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team

Hi,

Can anyone explain why D is incorrect?

From what I can see, ' and' provides parallelism to both the lists. Also, the sentence maintains the correct structure.

Thank you.