SC FROM GMAT PREP

for the first E and for the second one A

Top Q:
The first split I used for this question is "that" versus no "that." In general, when the GMAT says "something INDICATES [a clause]," you need a "that" following the "indicates."

ex:
The research INDICATES people like stinky cheese. INCORRECT (bc the verb "like" is present, making the second part of the sentence a clause)
The research INDICATES THAT people like stinky cheese. CORRECT
The research INDICATES a general preference for stinky cheese. (This is technically ok, bc there is no verb in the part of the sentence after "indicates," but this is also not something that shows up on the GMAT nearly as much as the other two examples above.)


Therefore, A and B are out. There are other issues with A and B-- (A) would read "indicate few people TO," which is undiomatic. (A) also slips in a "nor," which is not justified without the structure "neither X NOR Y". When you cut away the modifers, choice (B) reads "indicates few people [a noun phrase]... OR made [a verb]," which is not only poor parallelism but also a garbling of the intended meaning.

That leaves us with C, D, and E. Choice (C) is, again, not parallel. Parallelism would dictate:
....that there are few people who have significantly reduced...or who have made"

Choice D changes the intended meaning, which is that although energy prices are rising, this is not affecting consumer behavior. If few people have reduced their driving AND few people are not making fuel efficiency a priority, it's like saying few people have reduced their driving and a LOT of people are making fuel efficiency a priority. Lose it.

Choice (E) has nice, clean parallelism ("few people have REDUCED...or MADE") and preserves the intended meaning of the sentence.

Bottom Q:

The placement of the word "when" here (right after the underlined portion) is a tipoff that you should pay attention to the split between the placement of the "1788." Although this rule is more often applied to the relative pronoun "which," you want to make sure that a modifying clause beginning with ", when" is immediately preceded by the specific time/date mentioned in the sentence. This knocks out C, D, and E...What about the fact that those three answers end in ", FROM"--putting a word between the comma and the "when" clause? If you weren't sure, you can still knock out these three for other reasons:

(C) pronoun ambiguity* ("their"--non-Australians or curved objects or boomerangs?). Also, the modifying phrase "regardless of their form or function" should be next to "all aerodynamically enhanced, curved objects made for throwing"--not "boomerangs" (we know the function of boomerangs--it's those other curvy things that could have alternate forms or functions!)

(D) pronoun ambiguity* ("its"--boomerang or any curved object?) and the same modifier placement issue as above. Also, the placement of the phrase "non-Australians" could be misconstrued to mean the thing was literally called "a-boomerang-by-non-Australians" which is a little silly.

(E) pronoun ambiguity* ("their"). Also, the placement of "boomerangs" could lead to a silly meaning (some objects were made for "throwing boomerangs?" what?). The placement of the date is potentially confusing here, too.

The structures of choices (A) and (B) clean up the modifer placement issues. BUT
if you scan (A) and (B) vertically, they are identical until the words "all" (choice A) and "any"(choice B). Since both choices begin with the pronoun "their" to refer to the curved objects, we need a PLURAL subject. (B), which uses "any/object" is out. We're left with A.

*note: remember that a small degree of pronoun ambiguity can sometimes be tolerated in correct answers on the GMAT--best to go with the modifier issues here as the fatal flaws.

1 - E --- parallelism...reduced & made
2 - A --- correct version