Located at the very coal mines that provided them with fuel, the use

I chose option D as the answer and after reading the explanations I can understand why it is wrong. However, I am not too confident of marking option B. Does the phrase 'drainage of mines' have similar meaning as 'mines to be drained of water' (original sentence)? I don't think so and feel there is some meaning change with the avoidance of the word 'water' from answer choice B. Requesting expert opinion on how parallelism trumps meaning aspect and in general how to select an option choice wherein one aspect is right and other is wrong. (hypothetical case)

Located at the very coal mines that provided them with fuel, the use of steam engines in eighteenth-century England increased coal production by allowing for mines to be drained of water and permitting extraction of deeper layers of coal.

(A) the use of steam engines in eighteenth-century England increased coal production by allowing for mines to be drained of water and permitting

(B) steam engines increased coal production in eighteenth-century England by permitting the drainage of mines and the

(C) steam engines in eighteenth-century England allowed an increase in coal production by permitting the drainage of mine water and permitting

(D) steam engines increased coal production in eighteenth-century England by allowing water to be drained out of mines and

(E) eighteenth-century use of steam engines increased English coal production by draining mines and

A very important question of modifiers and parallelism.
How to eliminate errors:
Given information:
Located at - that’s the clue . What is located at the coal mines ? We can easily arrive to B, C, D. A and E are out .
Check for any other clue in the given information- extraction - noun . Check for another noun , which can form parallelism.
B- drainage and extraction- so far so good. Keep B
C- why do we have to use permitting two times. It’s not required. Also, C is wordy and it has its own problems.
D- to be drained out - we are talking about 18 century. Can we use - to be drained out. Also meaning issue.
We are left with B and C.
I go with B because it’s straight, meaningful and elegant.

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Hello MayankDimri,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, the omission of "water" from the phrase "drainage of mines" does not change the meaning of the sentence; the inclusion of "of water" in Option A is superfluous, as it can be understood that "water" is what is drained from a mine.

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

Option C- steam engines in eighteenth-century England allowed an increase in coal production
by permitting the drainage of mine water
and
permitting
Here modifier "by permitting.. (prepositional phrase) and "permitting" (-ing modifier) ... are both parallel and also it does not omit the word "water"
please explain how this this wrong.

The OA has omitted the word "water"

The sentence lists two ways in which steam engines increased coal production.

Ask yourself—Between drainage of mines (B) and drainage of mine water (C), which one more directly accounts for an increase in coal-mine production?
The answer to that one is definitely drainage of mines: Once you've drained the mine, you can get more coal out of it (the mine). The water, on the other hand, isn't directly related to coal production.



Two ways to figure this one out:
• A steam engine creates steam. Steam comes from boiling water.
AND/OR
• Out there in the real world, are there any other liquids that fill up holes in the ground (such as open mines), besides water?

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