The GMAT usually doesn't get poetic like this, and it’s one of the very few metaphors I’ve ever seen on official SC questions. Like any other GMAT SC question that uses “like”, we need two nouns that are logically comparable – and the tricky part here is deciding which of the metaphorical comparisons is actually “logically comparable.”
We covered some similar issues in our
YouTube webinar on comparisons, so head on over there if you prefer your explanations in video form.
Quote:
(A) the sandpipers vanishing in the northeastern United States is a result of residential and industrial development and of changes in
The comparison here is shaky, but I’m not 100% sure that it’s absolutely wrong. Is there any reason why we can’t compare “the grassy field and old pastures” with “the sandpipers”, since both are vanishing? I guess not. So we can tolerate the comparison, even though there are better versions below.
The bigger problem: “the sandpipers vanishing…
is a result…” The sandpipers (plural!) are the subject; vanishing is just an adjective. So the subject-verb agreement is wrong here. (If you think this “sounds OK”, you’re not wrong. The subject-verb agreement would be OK if “sandpipers” was possessive, because then “vanishing” would be the subject. But that’s not what’s actually happening here.)
So (A) is out.
Quote:
(B) the bird itself is vanishing in the northeastern United States as a result of residential and industrial development and of changes in
Not bad, the comparison is clarified somewhat by the use of “the bird
itself”: that phrase is nicely comparable to “the grassy fields and old pastures”, since both are disappearing.
The parallelism also works well later in the sentence: “the bird itself is vanishing… as a result
of residential and industrial development and
of changes in….” That’s great: the bird is vanishing as a result of X and of Y. Keep (B).
Quote:
(C) that the birds themselves are vanishing in the northeastern United States is due to residential and industrial development and changes to
This isn’t a total disaster, but it’s not great, either. “Like the grassy fields and old pastures…,
that the birds themselves are vanishing... is due to… development and changes…” In this particular use of “that”, the word basically means “the fact that.” So we’re literally comparing “the grassy fields and old pastures” to “the fact that the birds are vanishing.”
That doesn’t make any sense at all: we could compare the fields and pastures to the birds, and then say that all three of those things are vanishing. But we can’t compare the fields and pastures to the
fact that the birds are vanishing.
So we can eliminate (C), too.
Quote:
(D) in the northeastern United States, sandpipers' vanishing due to residential and industrial development and to changes in
A lot of this is pretty clunky, but the real problem is that the grassy fields and old pastures are compared to “sandpipers’ vanishing.” And that doesn’t make sense: we’re literally comparing fields and pastures to “vanishing” – and not to the sandpipers themselves.
Plus, (D) doesn’t actually have an independent clause, which means that it isn’t a proper sentence. So (D) is gone.
Quote:
(E) in the northeastern United States, the sandpipers' vanishing, a result of residential and industrial development and changing
(E) has exactly the same issues as (D): the comparison is nonsense, and the sentence isn’t actually a real sentence, since it lacks an independent clause. So (B) is the best we can do.
as a subject of the 2nd part of the sententence? Can we consider participle phrase as subject of a clause?
a result of residential and industrial development and of changes in farming practices' is fine.
is his idea of a day well spent.
Although here subject is gerund phrase, I did not get an appropriate example.
close
11 Jan 2019, 10:33
Thanks 
