More than 300 rivers drain into Siberia's Lake Baikal, which holds 20

For some reason, a large percentage of my students hate this question with the fury of a thousand suns. But you’ll love it… right?


I don’t really see any problems with (A). The “which” jumps out at me, but that seems fine, since “which holds 20% of the world’s fresh water” logically modifies “Siberia’s Lake Baikal.” That last modifier seems fine, too: “more than all the North American Great Lakes combined” describes “20% of the world’s fresh water.”

So I guess we’ll keep (A), and hope that the other four answer choices have problems.


I’m not sure that anything is WRONG with (B), but there are three or four things that are spectacularly crappy about (B). (Craptacular? That’s not a word, but it should be.)

For starters, “with 20% of the world’s fresh water” is a lousy way to modify “Siberia’s Lake Baikal.” The preposition “with” generally suggests accompaniment of some sort (“I eat burritos with green chile” or “I went to the movies with my daughter”), and I can’t understand why we would use “with” in this context. Plus, it’s a long way from the thing it modifies. Again, I can’t prove that it’s WRONG, but it’s not great.

I also can’t make sense of the middle modifier, “that is more than all the North American Great Lakes combined.” For starters, I can’t figure out why we’re using a modifier beginning with “that” immediately after a comma. More importantly, the comparison doesn’t work: it’s basically saying that 20% of the world’s fresh water is more than the Great Lakes. You could say that the amount of water in Lake Baikal is greater than the amount of water in the Great Lakes, but it isn’t awesome to say that the amount of water is greater than the lakes themselves.

Finally, there’s no reason to write “…Lake Baikal has more than 300 rivers that drain into it” when we could use a more active construction (“more than 300 rivers drain into Lake Baikal”). The version in (B) isn’t WRONG, exactly, but it’s pretty craptacular compared to (A).

So we can ditch (B).


The most straightforward problem with (B) is that the subject is basically repeated twice: “Siberia’s Lake Baikal, (blah blah modifier), it holds…” That’s definitely not cool.

For bonus points, the modifier beginning with “with” still doesn’t seem quite right (see the explanation to (B) for more on that issue), and the comparison isn’t quite right, either: “Lake Baikal… holds more of the world’s fresh water than all that of the… Great Lakes…” “That” presumably refers to water, so that gives us “Lake Baikal… holds more of the world’s fresh water than [all the water of] the… Great Lakes.” And that’s wildly unnecessary: it’s better just to say that Lake Baikal holds more water than the Great Lakes.

But even if you ignore that last paragraph, the “Lake Baikal… it holds…” thing is a huge problem. So (C) is out.


The “which” jumps out at me first. The phrase “which is more than… the Great Lakes…” seems to modify “20% of the world’s fresh water”, and that doesn’t quite work: it’s illogical to say that a quantity of water is “more than… the Great Lakes.” It might be more than the water in the Great Lakes, but not “more than” the Great Lakes themselves.

Plus, “while” is essentially a synonym for “although” in this case, and that doesn’t make sense: “[Although] more than 300 rivers drain into it, Siberia’s Lake Baikal…[is large].” “Although” suggests some sort of contrast, and there’s definitely no contrast between those two phrases.

So (D) is out.


That opening modifier, “more than all the… Great Lakes combined”, still isn’t great: it’s literally suggesting that Lake Baikal is “more than the Great Lakes”, and that doesn’t make sense. Maybe the amount of water in Lake Baikal is more than the amount in all of the Great Lakes, but Lake Baikal itself isn’t “more than” the Great Lakes.

I’m also not crazy about the use of “with” as a modifier in (E). For more on this issue, see the explanation for (B) above.

(E) isn’t a complete disaster, but (A) does a better job of conveying the meaning of the sentence, so (A) is our answer.