pk6969 wrote:
Hi! Multiple doubts in this question.Thanks in advance. Firstly, I knew that A is the best of all but was hesitant to select it because I didn't see the need to use subjunctive form here. Subjunctives are generally used in the cases of demand, request, order etc, but in this it is just highlighting an important thing.
Secondly, here being is used as a modifier and being as a modifier is not right, 99percent time so is this a correct reason to eliminate it?
Lastly, chemically induced damage and damage induced chemically, what's the difference?
AndrewN IanStewart GMATNinjaFirst, the subjunctive mood is generally used to express things that are hypothetical and not actual. So we use it with commands, for example in the phrase "I command that you be present at the seminar" because you aren't actually present at the seminar. The sentence in this question is also expressing something hypothetical, and you could also say "It's important that you be at the seminar". If you instead say "It's important that you are at the seminar", that would suggest you actually are at the seminar, and your attendance is important for some reason. The subjunctive is not used in this question to "highlight an important thing". There is a form of "to be" that is used for emphasis, but it's not the subjunctive. When we use "shall" instead of "will", that is an emphatic form of "to be" -- "we shall test the chromosomes" is a more forceful or committed way of saying "we will test the chromosomes" (though grammar purists will say the opposite is true in the first person -- purists say "I shall" is the normal form, and "I will" is the emphatic form). But I can't imagine the GMAT would ever test the distinction between "shall" and "will", and the distinction isn't really observed anyway in contemporary language.
There's nothing wrong with how "being" is used in some of the wrong answers here, and I don't think test takers should just automatically rule out answers with "being" in them. There are a few official questions where the correct answer uses "being", and there are lots of imaginable sentences where "being" is a perfectly good word to use. In general, -ing modifiers are often better avoided, which is one reason "being" can be a bad word in many cases, but that's certainly not always true.
Lastly about the distinction between "chemically induced damage" and "damage induced chemically", the first form is preferable to the second because it's clear when you put the description first, then the noun, that the description describes the noun. But the second form isn't wrong, and I don't see any difference in meaning. There wouldn't be an SC question where you needed to distinguish between two phrases like these to choose the right answer.