Namangupta1997 wrote:
Hi
GMATNinja KarishmaB After going through the options, my entire POE was based on the fact that the "the evolutionary advantage.." modifier is incorrectly modifying malaria. It has been pointed out by one of the users that since the starting 'phrase' is by itself a complete sentence, the modifier does not necessarily modify the closest noun. Is that really what is happening here? How do we pin-point what is exactly being modified?
(C), (D), and (E) have bigger problems!
Choice (D) is out right away because of the parallelism issue:
"People seemingly are resistant (1) to malaria and (2) to have an evolutionary advantage..."
Looking just at the second item in the list, we have, "People seemingly are resistant to have an evolutionary advantage," and that doesn't make any sense.
We described the problem with (E) in an earlier post:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/people-who-i ... l#p2286907. Choice (C) is out for a similar reason: it seems like we're splitting the "evolutionary advantage" part from the "being resistant to malaria" part. As a result, it's not clear whether the "evolutionary advantage" is (1) the resistance to malaria or (2) some other, unmentioned trait.
So we're left with (A) and (B). And since the modifier is the same in both, we don't really have to worry about it.
If (A) and (B) had "which is" after the comma ("... resistant to malaria,
which is an evolutionary advantage..."), then the modifier would be more problematic: in that case, the "which" noun modifier would certainly appear to describe the malaria itself. As it is, the modifier is more flexible and can logically describe the entire preceding clause.
I hope that helps!
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