The Immigration Act of 1917 halted immigration from most Asian

Hello lnm87

Please find below, an explanation to clear up your doubts.

The intended meaning of the sentence will always be present in the original sentence. In this case, the meaning of the sentence is that the Immigration Act of 1917 did two things; it halted all immigration from Asian countries into the United States and it imposed a literacy requirement for immigrants. This meaning is made clear from the use of the "and" conjunction; the error in Option A is one of tense.

Hope this helps.

All the best!
Experts' Global Team

still not sure why D is wrong. gramatically it looks fine. IMO, the law stopped the immigration because it introduced the literacy requirement and this helped in halting of the immigrants. why is D wrong?

Hello, everyone. I am never afraid to stick my neck out if it means contributing something meaningful to the community. I hope my thoughts may help others on this question.

To be clear, I agree that the split between answer choices (D) and (E) is unfair and would not appear as such on the GMAT™. If we strip the sentence down to its essential components, we are left with something akin to the following:

(D) [Legislation] halted immigration by imposing a requirement [of some sort].

(E) [Legislation] halted immigration and imposed a requirement [of some sort].

In the former option, it is perfectly legitimate to use an adverbial phrase to explain how legislation may have caused immigration to come to a halt. There is nothing wrong with saying that non-physical entities can do something. See, for instance, this official question in which landfills are prohibited from doing something.

That said, there is no way to argue against (E). The parallelism between the two actions is the sort of feature that can prove decisive at times. Note that, once again, the legislation is performing both actions; we simply understand those actions to be outcomes of some unnamed group having written and passed such legislation. Speaking to the original sentence, it holds no particular significance in the underlined portion, so we cannot point to that part of (A) and say that it serves as a template for the correct answer. The whole point of SC is to select the best iteration from among the five choices presented on the very part that is underlined, so anything underlined is negotiable.

If I were to see (D) and (E) on a third-party quiz, I would choose (E) as the safer option—you never want to chase could-be-true answers when an unassailable option is available, and the GMAT™ prefers a parallel option whenever possible—but I would also throw my hands into the air and rant about the integrity of such questions. You cannot beat official questions for Verbal practice, period. Even if you have managed to comb through every single one, you can go through the questions again, pick them apart, and learn more about SC than you can from poring over any unofficial question set.

I call this question a spade, with all due respect to the authors. I think the point was to emphasize parallelism, but the urge to get that point across may have jeopardized the overall aim to create a GMAT™-like question.

- Andrew

Hello shivangiindore,

We hope this finds you well.

Having gone through the question and your query, we believe we can resolve your doubt.

Option E is a safer choice than Option D, as it is more in line with the meaning conveyed in the original sentence.

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

It is my suspicion that this is an unfair question. It requires too much specific contextual knowledge. However, we can still practice the interpretation of *meaning* here.



This version of the sentence says the literary requirement was the method by which the law halted immigration.



This version of the sentence says the act did two things: halted immigration of most Asian countries, AND imposed a literary requirement for immigrants entering the country.

Let's consider some simpler sentences:

In his biathlon, he swam half a mile by running a half marathon.

In his biathlon, he swam half a mile and ran a half marathon.

Here, the second must be correct. The first is not technically grammatically wrong, it just says that running is the method he used to swim... that makes no sense. Now consider this pair:

She trained for his marathon by running 20 miles every week.

She trained for his marathon and ran 20 miles every week.

Here the FIRST sentence must be right. The '20 miles a week' is clearly how this person trained for her marathon. The second sentence says two things she did, but their relation to each other is not nearly as strong.

So in this sentence, we need to ask if the literacy requirement is HOW immigration from Asian countries was halted. Again, this requires a lot of outside knowledge--too much for a GMAT question, I think--to say 'no.'

Immigration being halted from 'most Asian countries' means you could not immigrate from certain *countries*. The only way a literacy requirement could stop immigration from a whole country is if the entire country was not literate in English. That just won't be the case. More likely the law simply halted immigration from that country--"No immigrants allowed from Malaysia"--and also imposed literacy requirements for all immigrants.

If the sentence said "The Immigration Act of 1917 prevented most Asian immigrants from entering into the United States by imposing a literacy requirement for immigrants entering the country" we might have a different story. A literacy requirement could conceivably stop most IMMIGRANTS. But it would not halt immigration from COUNTRIES.

Again, I think this is too much outside knowledge for an official question. But do note--I'm using some pretty rock-solid GMAT SC skills to pinpoint *why* it's not a fair question. In order to use my outside knowledge to explain why D's meaning isn't quite right, I have to be super specific on what D's meaning *is*: these 'literacy requirements' someone halt immigration from WHOLE COUNTRIES, as if EVERYONE IN THE COUNTRY IS ILLITERATE IN ENGLISH. My experiential knowledge tells me there's no way that's feasible.

I also would note, I disagree with some of the explanations in this thread. For example, while it's common to say an answer is wrong because it 'changes the meaning of the sentence,' that's not really why an answer is wrong. The original sentence's meaning sometimes *must* be changed. Better is to say the meaning of a sentence is ILLOGICAL or clearly doesn't capture the sentences INTENDED MEANING (and intended meaning comes from the *whole question*, not just the sentence as written).

I also disagree that the GMAT 'prefers' parallelism. There are times, and questions, where grammatically correct parallelism is incorrect because the meaning within the structure is wrong. See the questions above with the 'biathlon' and 'marathon.' Parallelism is right in one and wrong on the other, and it's purely meaning that determines which.

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