The World Wildlife Fund has declared that global warming, a phenomenon

The World Wildlife Fund has declared that global warming, a phenomenon that most scientists agree is caused by human beings' burning of fossil fuels, will create havoc among migratory birds by harming their habitats as a result of altering the environment.


(A) by harming their habitats as a result of altering the environment ...The question here is whether the global warming harms the habitats first or alters the environment first. Obviously, the alteration of the environment is the first action and then is the damage to the habitats. This choice slips by suggesting that the damage to the habitats occurs first.

(B) by altering the environment to the extent of it harming their habitats -- "It' cannot refer to the environment since then it will mean that environment caused the damage to the habitats. Nor can 'it' refer to either global warming or the phenomenon harming their habitats. AS stated in A, global warming did not directly harm the habitats.

(C) by altering the environment in ways harmful to their habitats --- Perhaps the best logical choice.

(D) from the fact that their habitats will be harmed by the environment being altered - This is not standard English writing.

(E) from the fact that the environment will be altered and this will harm their habitats -- same as D.
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Related OG question discussed here :

https://gmatclub.com/forum/the-world-wi ... 03470.html

Posted from my mobile device
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C it should be..

A- awkward.. Illogical
B - It
D - awkward and Wordy
E- This

Sent from my Redmi Note 4 using GMAT Club Forum mobile app

I am still confused between A and C,can some one please elaborate,why C and why not A?

Posted from my mobile device

Re-read the option A:


If we ask the question, how does global warming harm their habitats? the answer is: by altering the environment. The presence of 'as a result of altering the environment' at the end of the sentence doesn't clearly show that global warming is altering the environment. In A, there is an ambiguity of who/ what is altering the environment.

sriramsundaram91,

What is the antecedent of 'it' in B?

It can be phenomenon/environment

Still don't understand Why A is not correct. I am so confuse right now.
Can someone try to explain it to me, please ?

Coggi: Consider this explanation:

Global warming will cause havoc among birds
Cause 1 = Global Warming
Effect 1 = Cause Havoc

Global warming will cause havoc among birds by harming their habitats
If the sentence was this long, it surely would have worked.
Cause 1 = Global Warming
Effect 1 = Cause Havoc
Effect 2 = Harming Habitats

Global warming will cause havoc among birds by harming their habitats as a result of altering the environment
Cause 1 = Global Warming
Effect 1= Cause Havoc
Effect 2 = Harming Habitats
Effect 3 = Altering the environments
However, as a result makes it sound like it is actually a cause, not an effect thus creating confusion

Altering the environment - Cause or effect?!

However, when you write the sentence like this:

Global warming causes havoc among migratory birds by altering the environment in ways harmful to the birds' habitats

Global Warming (cause 1) -> Causes Havoc (effect 1)
Alters environment (cause 2- in continuation to effect 1) - > harms habitats (effect 2)

Hope this makes things clear!

I have a slightly different question: Shouldn't option C have 'harmful to the birds' habitats' instead of 'their habitats'? Does the presence of 'environment' in the sentence not pose a problem for usage of 'their' as a pronoun?

Hello everybody:

May anyone explain why A is incorrect? Its not clear for me.

Thanks!

Hello juan20082037, Coggi, Jbrandl1, and all the others who have confusion regarding why Choice A is incorrect.

The original sentence says: The World Wildlife Fund has declared that global warming, a phenomenon that most scientists agree is caused by human beings' burning of fossil fuels, will create havoc among migratory birds by harming their habitats as a result of altering the environment.

The sentence presents a couple of cause-and-effect events.

First instance: Cause - harm to their habitats; Effect - (will create) havoc among migratory birds.

Second instance: Cause - alteration of the environment; Effect - (will create) havoc among migratory birds.

The way the sentence is worded, the two causes appear to be independent causes leading to the same effect. Moreover, the factor of environmental alteration does not associate with global warming also. So, the way the sentence is written, it does not present the intended logical meaning very clearly.

Now let's study the correct answer choice C: The World Wildlife Fund has declared that global warming, a phenomenon that most scientists agree is caused by human beings' burning of fossil fuels, will create havoc among migratory birds by altering the environment in ways harmful to their habitats.

This sentence clearly states the events as they will unfold: global warming will create havoc among migratory birds. How? By changing the environment in such ways that will harm their habitats. Hence, the havoc. So, Choice C conveys the intended meaning very clearly without using complex phrases.


Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha
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Hey GMATNinja this is from Verbal Review OG 2020, can someone update source plx.

Thanks

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Added the tag. Thank you!
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The expert replies so far aren't satisfactory for a deeper error understanding.

Hi experts,

This was one of the first OG questions I came across in which order really matters. Choice A seems to be grammatically correct, but the meaning is off.

The Official Guide's explanation as to why A is wrong is as follows "although this sentence accurately describes what causes what, the elements are listed in an order that does not correspond to the order of causation (global warming is following by harming the habitats, which is followed by altering the environment.)"

Are there other official questions that you can point me to/would recommend studying in which the concept of causation is tested?

Thank you

GMATNinja EMPOWERgmatVerbal can you please share your analysis

Please keep in mind that the OG SC answer explanations are of middling quality at best. They are quite often incomplete or less than fully accurate; occasionally they contain statements that are actually wrong.
This is one of many examples of a less-than-stellar SC answer explanation.

The biggest issue with A is that it just doesn't state the reasonably intended content of the sentence correctly. A phenomenon as broad and unspecific as global warming is going to impact bird habitats only by wreaking more general environmental havoc, which in turn degrades the bird habitats. General global warming is not going to attack bird habitats in some specifically targeted way, as is implied by the direct subject-verb relationship in choice A.

Choice C, on the other hand, expresses the actual direct impact—i.e., of global warming upon the environment—as the main subject and verb of the sentence.


Choice A does express the time relationship badly, but (contra the answer key you cited) not to the extent of actually reversing the right order. Instead, the temporal issue in A is the implication that the entire sum-total action of global warming on the environment FIRST takes place, and ONLY THEN, as a "result", is there any degradation of bird habitats. That's not reasonable.

Choice C, on the other hand, allows for the much more reasonable interpretation that the entire process of environmental alteration is bad for bird habitats.

Cause-and-effect is one of the simplest and most important possible relations that can potentially be expressed between two clauses/actions—and thus one of the most heavily tested such relations on GMAT SC. There are tons and tons and tons of SC sentences that describe causal relations.
(In addition, there are quite a few that describe non-causal relations, e.g., two separate/independent parallel actions, which are erroneously rendered as causal in some of the wrong answer choice.)

Accordingly, you shouldn't need to conduct a high-energy search to turn up SC sentences that contain causality. They're all over the place.



If, on the other hand, you specifically mean sentences that wrongly order certain actions in some of the wrong answers—That's not something that happens very often. (It doesn't happen in this problem, either, sloppily written answer explanations notwithstanding. Please see the post above for an explanation of this.)

I suspect that mis-ordering is relatively rare because, in MOST contexts, putting two definitively sequential events/actions/observations in the wrong order would create such an outrageously ridiculous meaning that it would become much too easy to eliminate any such choices.
That said, there are official problems with wrong answers whose mistake is reversing a sequential order. There aren't many, though. Here's one of them (n.b.: the two descriptions that are wrongly reversed are NOT a cause and an effect in this case).

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