thangvietnam wrote:
macjas wrote:
Starfish, with anywhere from five to eight arms, have a strong regenerative ability, and if one arm is lost it quickly replaces it, sometimes by the animal overcompensating and growing an extra one or two.
A one arm is lost it quickly replaces it, sometimes by the animal overcompensating and
B one arm is lost it is quickly replaced, with the animal sometimes overcompensating and
C they lose one arm they quickly replace it, sometimes by the animal overcompensating,
D they lose one arm they are quickly replaced, with the animal sometimes overcompensating,
E they lose one arm it is quickly replaced, sometimes with the animal overcompensating,
I do not like this problem though it is in the latest
og book. overcompensating and growing can not be separate actions. so "and" is wrong to connect them. the separateness is tested a lot on gmat sc and is central staple gmat play on us . strange, why gmat make mistake on this point.
or my english grammar is not good enough.
dont worry, there is only one question like this in the latest
og book.
Dear
thangvietnam,
I'm happy to respond.
Yes, this is SC #114, in the OG13 and the OG2015.
It's absolutely true that the OA,
(B), is not ideal. The "
and" link between the two participles, "
overcompensating" and "
growing," is certainly questionable. Technically, are those two actions identical? Does losing the arm set off a biological chain of events in the starfish that we would called "overcompensating," and that one result among many of this "overcompensating" is the "growing" of two arms? I certainly don't know enough about the biology of starfish to answer this question either way, but it's at least conceivable that the actions "
overcompensating" and "
growing" are not coextensively identical and therefore merit an "
and" conjunction. Admittedly, this is somewhat ambiguous.
Similarly, the "
with" + [noun] + [participle] structure---actually, two participles in parallel---is also questionable. Certainly, this structure, with different emphases, is considered incorrect on some questions. Again, this is iffy.
So,
(B) has nothing that is clearly, unambiguously wrong, but it has some "shades of gray" problems. What makes it the right answer is that each other answer has something definitively wrong about it. Choices
(A) &
(C) &
(D) all make trainwreck pronoun errors, so they are not even possibly correct. In
(E), the big problem is subtle. In a condition statement, an if-then statement, the "if" part is called the
premise, and the "then" part is called the
conclusion. The grammar supports the logic of the conditional statement when both premise and conclusion are in the same voice---either both active or both passive.
(E) makes the mistake of having an active premise and a passive conclusion, and this sounds undefinably awkward. Since
(E) can be right, it only leaves
(A) with all its imperfections.
Remember, this is #114 in the
OG. There is a rough correlation between question number and difficulty, and since this is a higher question, it is one of the more difficult questions in the
OG. This is one characteristic of the more difficult SC questions: the OA is far from ideal, but it's better than the other four answers, each of which is wrong for a clear and discernible reason.
Does all this make sense?
Mike