Parallelism Tuesday - Weekly Revision!

Week 4 - 30th May Update

Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Question 6
Question 7
Question 8
Question 9
Question 10

1(A) Kathy donated $1000 to a charitable trust that helps underprivileged students to pursue primary education and also encourages people to donate for a cause.

1(B) Kathy donated $1000 to a charitable trust that helps underprivileged students to pursue primary education and also supports for other social beneficial activities.

Here both sentences make sense with subject as Kathy and Charitable trust( relative pronoun that refers to the trust).
i.So, are these sentences ambiguous?
ii.Or the verb encourages or supports is parallel to the verb donates for Kathy since the marker THAT is not present after AND.
iii. Also, I don't think we can use verb tenses here to clear the ambiguity since parallel clauses can be in different tenses.

2(A) Kathy donates $1000 every year to a charitable trust that helps underprivileged students to pursue primary education and also supports for other social beneficial activities.

2(B) Kathy donates $1000 every year to a charitable trust that helps underprivileged students to pursue primary education and also that supports for other social beneficial activities.

In 2(A) , both the verbs donates and supports refer to Kathy , but in 2(B) , the verbs helps and supports refer to the subject THAT i.e Charitable trust (since the marker that is present)


mcelroytutoring , AjiteshArun , GMATNinja , mikemcgarry , egmat , sayantanc2k, RonPurewal , DmitryFarber , MagooshExpert , ccooley , daagh , other experts-- please enlighten

1. Your major point is correct: the list in the first sentence can consist of either 'donated' and 'encourages' (two things that Kathy does), or 'helps' and 'encourages' (two things that the charitable trust does).

2. I'm not aware of any official SC problem that tests ambiguity in exactly this way. The closest one I can think of is SC697 from the OG2018. However, in that problem, the official explanation concludes (and I agree) that one of the ways of reading the sentence makes more logical sense than the other one. In your example, I think both ways of reading the sentence make logical sense. So, if I saw this on the test, I would look for another issue to work with. I wouldn't feel confident saying that the first sentence is 'wrong' due to the ambiguity. Please let me know if there's another official problem you're thinking of!

3. You're correct that the verb tenses don't help resolve the ambiguity here, since verbs can be parallel and be in different tenses.

4. The idiom 'supports for' in your second sentence is incorrect, as is the use of 'social.' You'd want it to read 'supports other socially beneficial activities.' That's not related to your question about parallelism, but it's relevant, since I'd eliminate the second sentence on those grounds!

5. Sentence 2b sounds incorrect to me, but I'm not totally sure why. I want it to read 'that helps... and also supports'. (In other words, it seems weird to have two 'thats' in a parallel list that includes the word 'also'.)

Here's a simpler sentence with the same issue; this one sounds a little off to me too.

'I see a house that has a blue roof and also that has a red door.' = wrong??

'I see a house that has a blue roof and also has a red door.' = right

Hey souvik101990 Thanks for creating these revision threads. They have been very useful.

Question 8 in this list seems like a very low quality question and the discussion for the same is locked as well. Request you to remove it from the list.

this is really nice. We practice number of questions, sometime irrelevant questions. You are saving time and providing good question.
I became fan of you because of your posts
Thank you

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