As a baby emerges from the darkness of the womb with a rudimentary sen

Dear All

While D is the correct answer, please can you help me understand the phrase after the semi colon.

Reason am asking is that I understand semi colon should have independent clauses before and after and within D, after colon, an adult such vision .... isn't such vision something unclear or does not have precedent , hence fragment or incorrect sentence.

(D) A baby emerges from the darkness of the womb with a rudimentary sense of vision that would be rated about 20/500; an adult with such vision would be deemed legally blind.

An independent clause must be able to stand on its own grammatically. It doesn't mean that you can't refer to another clause to understand it.

Think of the way you learned to structure a paragraph when you were introduced to formal essay-writing in school. The first sentence introduces an idea. The next one elaborates on this idea, or provides an example to illustrate it. It may well be the case that the second sentence doesn't make sense without the first, but that doesn't mean that there's a grammatical error in it!

Similarly, we'll often use a pronoun in one clause to refer to an antecedent in another. You can basically think about the usage of "such vision" that way - it refers to "20/500," and that's perfectly fine.

I hope that helps!

Option A: "As a baby emerges from the darkness of the womb with a rudimentary sense of vision, it would be rated about 20/500, or legally blind if it were an adult with such vision"

I was confused between A and D. I somehow felt that there is a meaning change in option D and chose the wrong answer A.

Is the ambiguous usage of "it" the only mistake in option A?


Please clarify.

The usage of "it" is worse than ambiguous in (A). Because "it" is the subject of a clause and "a baby" is the subject of the previous clause, it seems as though "it" is referring to "a baby." Rating a baby 20/500 isn't just nonsensical, it's downright mean. (On a good day, my baby would rate at least a 120 on a 500 point scale.)

Worse still, the clause "if it were an adult with such vision" suggests that a baby could be an adult! I would not want to live in such a world. And neither would that man-baby's poor mother...

GMATNinja, egmat,

Thanks for clarifications. My answer choice D is correct at first place. However I have 2 questions :
Q1 : I can see it is mentioned that 'it' can refer to baby. Can 'it' pronoun refer to 'baby' which is human and not things ?
Q2 : In answer choice D, 'with' is modifying 'womb' or 'baby' ? I understand GMAT does not prefer sentences which use 'with'.

Excellent questions!

In fact, question 1 is so good, I don't think it has a definitive answer. Surely, it's okay to exclaim, "It's a girl!" when a baby is born. And if someone knocks at your door, there's no problem asking "who is it?" But if your baby were throwing a tantrum on a plane, and someone else asked you to "feed it or something" the "it" seems inappropriate.

For what it's worth, I can't recall having seen an OA in which "it" referred to a person. So I'd be very surprised if "it" is ever used to refer to a person in a correct answer, but I can't say that with 100% certainty that it's absolutely WRONG, especially if "it" refers to "a baby" and we don't know its gender. But I wouldn't worry about this issue at all, since you will probably never see it as the deciding factor on an official question.

As for question 2, wouldn't it be nice if we could just memorize a list of prepositions the GMAT didn't like and then robotically eliminate those answer choices whenever we encountered such words? Sadly, the GMAT is going to force us to think, and we'll have to use a bit of logic to determine if a given construction is acceptable. In this case "with a rudimentary sense of vision" seems to be modifying the previous clause, "A baby emerges." This makes perfect sense -- when the baby emerges, it possesses a rudimentary sense of vision.

To summarize: there's nothing inherently wrong with "with." (If there were, I wouldn't have written the previous sentence!) Ask yourself what "with" is modifying and then determine whether the construction seems logical.

I hope that helps!

Isn't " which would be deemed legally blind for an adult" modifies rudimentary sense?
IMO when I read this by excluding modifier " which would be deemed legally blind for an adult" as
As a baby emerges from the darkness of the womb, its rudimentary sense of vision, which would be deemed legally blind for an adult, would be rated about 20/500.

Isn't that correct sentence? How E is wrong. I don't think that here 'its' is problematic.

Experts kindly help

The which would be... itself is not correct, so we shouldn't ignore it.

1. It's hard to argue that the "sense of vision" would be deemed legally blind. That is, what would we apply "legally blind" to? A person ("he is legally blind") or a "sense" ("his sense of vision is legally blind")?

2. Even if we disregard that issue, there's another meaning call here: we don't really want to say that a baby is "deemed legally blind" as it emerges from the womb. The intended meaning is that if an adult had such a sense of vision, he or she would be deemed legally blind.

The construction AS+clause is used for comparison.

I do not see any comparison in ACE. Is this correct reason to eliminate

daagh GMATNinja

Saurabh


How correct is this statement?

The role of the word 'as' is multi- faceted. That "as' can be used in the positive degree is one facet. However, we can also use 'as' for a subordinate conjunction meaning 'because", as done in the choices A, C ,and E.

Therefore A, C, and E are not wrong for lack of comparison. They are eliminated for their warped meaning and unclear pronoun references and the like.

daagh GMATNinja egmat Souvik

Hi,

I have a question about answer choice E.

(E) As a baby emerges from the darkness of the womb, its rudimentary sense of vision, which would be deemed legally blind for an adult, would be rated about 20/500.

What is the construction of the sentence ? Is it Subordinating Clause, Independent clause ? (Judging by the comma placement and absence of FANBOYS).


Will appreciate an answer please.

Thanks.

Hi altairahmad,

Yes, it is subordinate clause, independent clause:

As a baby emerges from the darkness of the womb, its rudimentary sense of vision would be rated about 20/500.

You are correct. The IC is inter-spaced with a relative clause modifier, which one can consign to the corner temporarily for clarity. Per se, this is a complex sentence.

Hi GMATNinja, daagh

I am not sure if you missed my post. I am just bumping the thread, in case you did not notice.

Thanks for your help.
Abhishek

Hi a12bansal,

The whole with such vision is a modifier (prepositional phrase, adjective for an adult). The such vision (noun phrase) is part of that modifier.

An adult with such vision would be deemed legally blind.

Let's cut this sentence down to:

An adult would be deemed legally blind.

Here it is slightly easier to see that an adult is the subject, and would be deemed is the verb. Now, the sentence is not trying to tell us that every adult would be deemed legally blind. That is where the with such vision comes in: only "an adult with such vision" would be deemed legally blind.

Can anyone tell me if this is Okay since no one seems to follow my way of reaching to D. I'd like to confirm if this is okay
A,C,E are out because use of As is incorrect i.e As is followed by a clause (Baby-sub Emerges -verb)which is used for making comparison and I don't see no comparison here at best it could be used As + role but then it should be noun/noun phrase not a clause so they're out and clearly D is better than B for reasons stated above

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Hi Deeptanshu02,

That's not the right way to get to the answer. There are many ways to use as, and the "comparison" meaning that you're looking at is just one of those ways. As followed by a clause also has a ~"while" or ~"during" meaning.