generis wrote:
Some business experts think that allowing employees to buy their employer's stock for a set price, no matter how high the stock rises, will give the employees a powerful incentive to work together, making a company more prosperous, which will thus increase the return to shareholders.
A) to work together, making a company more prosperous, which will thus
B) to work together to make a company more prosperous and will thus
C) for working together, making a company more prosperous, and thus they
D) for working together to make a company more prosperous, and thus it will
E) for working together and making a company more prosperous, which will thus
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What is the sentence telling us?
That some experts think if employees are allowed to buy their employer’s stock for a set price (presumably lower than the current market price), the employees will get an incentive to work together to make the company prosperous (which will further increase its share price and hence their profit from the stock). This is turn will increase the profit to shareholders. So basically, if the employees have a stake in the company, they may get motivated to work hard to make the company successful and this in turn will increase the return to shareholders.
Let’s focus on the ‘that’ clause.
… allowing employees to buy their employer's stock … will give the employees a powerful incentive to work together, making a company more prosperous, which will thus increase the return to shareholders.
In short, the structure of the clause looks like this:
A will give employees B, which will thus increase C.
There are two intents here:
Incentive to do what? to work together …
Work together to do what? to make a company more prosperous
This will lead to an increase in the return to shareholders.
GMAT prefers infinitive to show intent. So first of all, (A) and (B) are preferable over others because of their use of ‘to work together.’
For the same reason, the use of ‘to make a company…’ is preferable.
The use of present participle with a comma at the end of the clause ‘making a company more prosperous’ often implies an effect of the verb before. It makes a little less sense here though only because we have a better option. Will just giving an incentive to work together make the company prosperous? May be not. In a company, whether employees get an incentive or not, they do need to work together. It might make more sense that they will work together toward the goal of making the company prosperous. Hence, in this regard, (B) and (D) are preferable.
(E) gives us two actions that the employees will have incentive for - ‘working together’ and ‘making a company more prosperous.’ As discussed above, it makes more sense to say that they will ‘work together to make the company prosperous.’
‘Which’ and ‘it’ usually refer to nouns, not clauses. Hence, we can now ignore (A), (D) and (E) since we have found other issues too in them.
In option (C), ‘they’ most likely refers to employees but do the employees increase return to shareholders? Debatable but let’s not eliminate based on this alone.
Note the structure of option (C):
A will give employees B, and thus they increase C.
When we are talking about what could happen in the future, we should give its impact in the future tense too.
A will give employees B, and thus they will increase C.
Now we know that we should eliminate option (C) too.
We are left with (B) which is preferable in each aspect discussed above.
Answer (B)
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21 Dec 2022, 00:05
