I see a few queries about this one, so I will offer my thoughts in an effort to assist the community.
SivaKumarP wrote:
The professor's consistent late arrival is offset somewhat by the remarkable quality of his lectures.
A) The professor's consistent late arrival
The problem is that
consistent and
late are both acting as adjectives that are modifying
arrival. Is it a problem that the professor is arriving on a consistent basis? No. We cannot argue that the former adjective is modifying the latter either, since we would expect to see an adverb instead.
SivaKumarP wrote:
B) The consistent late arrival of the professor
This is a worse version of (A), adopting a prepositional phrase when a possessive works just fine, but the double adjective issue remains.
SivaKumarP wrote:
C) The professor's consistently late arrival
Now, an adverb properly modifies the adjective
late. If the professor were late once or perhaps every once in a while, there might not be a problem, but his
consistently late arrival gets in the way of his remarkable lectures. There is nothing to argue against here, which is why we have a compelling reason to select it.
SivaKumarP wrote:
D) Lately, the professor's arriving consistently
It is hard to know where to begin with this one. By separating
late and
arrival from earlier answer choices, we now have a sentence that conveys an entirely different notion, namely that it is a problem that
of late, or recently, the professor has been arriving consistently. I guess we are meant to think that sporadic appearances would be better. This nonsensical distortion of the sentence is good for a chuckle, nothing more.
SivaKumarP wrote:
E) The professor's consistent late arriving
Not only do we see the same problematic adjective pop up in
consistent, but we also get
arriving at the tail-end of the underlined portion, and the
action of arriving, whether late or on time, is better described as an arrival (similar to how we would say we were up for a
renewal of a license, not a renewing).
That is really all there is to this one. It can be useful to think of SC as a task in which the goal is to
disprove all the answers. The one that you have the hardest time debating is the one you should choose.
I hope that helps. If anyone has further questions, I would be happy to help out. Good luck with your studies.
- Andrew