In one of our recent
YouTube live videos, we spent a little bit of time discussing a totally unsexy idea: if you miss the important stuff in the NON-underlined portion of the sentence, you can get yourself into trouble on SC. And in this question, the word “them” should jump off the page at you, even though it's not underlined. It’s a sure sign that “wolves” needs to be plural.
With that in mind…
Quote:
(A) it is estimated that the wolf has declined to 200,000 in 57 countries, some
Well, “wolf” is singular in (A), and that’s a pretty big problem. The opening modifier (“once numbering in the millions worldwide”) also needs to be followed with something that actually “numbered” in the millions – so we need “wolves” to follow the comma.
So we have two great reasons to eliminate (A).
Quote:
(B) the wolf is estimated to have declined to 200,000 in 57 countries, with approximately
(B) has one of the same problems as (A): “them” (in the non-underlined portion of the sentence) can’t logically refer to “the wolf.”
And that’s enough to eliminate (B).
Quote:
(C) the wolf has declined to an estimate of 200,000 in 57 countries, some
And yet again: “them” is plural, but “the wolf” is singular. I’ll have more to say about the phrase declined to an estimate of 200,000” in a moment.
But for now, we can ditch (C).
(D) and (E) are the only two answer choices that correctly use the plural form of “wolves”, so let’s line these two up side-by-side:
Quote:
(D) wolves have declined to an estimate of 200,000 in 57 countries, with approximately
(E) wolves have declined to an estimated 200,000 in 57 countries, some
There are only two differences between the two answer choices. The first difference is the big one. In (D), we have “declined to an
estimate of 200,000”, and it doesn’t quite make sense to say that the wolves declined
to an estimate. (E) is much better: the wolves (i.e., the number of wolves) declined to “an
estimated 200,000”, which is a far clearer way to indicate that the wolf population declined to a certain level.
And there’s arguably a meaning difference at the end of the sentence: in (E), “some 11,000 of them…” very reasonably modifies “an estimated 200,000 in 57 countries.” In (D), I can’t quite make sense of the word “with” – in general, “with” suggests some sort of accompaniment (“I ate burritos with green chile” or “I went to the movies with my daughter”), and I can’t quite figure out how that would apply here.
So both of those differences are subtle, but both point in the same direction: (E) is better than (D).