Starfish, with anywhere from five to eight arms, have a strong regener

Hi E-GMAT

I have a doubt with regards to Choice B - the list marked by and in the modifier 'with the animal sometimes......two' - doesn't seem parallel. 'With the animal...' is a prepositional phrase whereas the phrase followed by and is a noun phrase ( growing an extra one or two). Is this a right ?

In first part of the sentence we have an active voice, stating starfish have an ability , and by choosing option b as the answer the second part becomes passive

This is confusing me, can someone pleaee help

Posted from my mobile device

"comma + V_ing" generally modifies the nearest action and the agent of the action. Here is my example

1) I can encounter a group of monkeys sleeping on the branches, hanging their legs and arms like socks on a clothesline

here, "sleeping" is an adjective and also kind of action that modifies monkeys, but for me, "hanging" seems to correctly modify "sleeping" and "monkeys"

why cannot "GROWING" modify "OVERCOMPENSATING" and its agent "ANIMAL"?

Thank you very much beforehand!

So there’s an interesting thing in this question: “starfish” could, in theory, be either singular or plural. (Much like the word “media” or “data” or “deer” or diabetes.) The GMAT has a very consistent habit in these cases: the sentence will always give you some other indication of whether the word is singular or plural.

And in this case? In the non-underlined portion, we have the phrase “Starfish… have a strong regenerative capacity…” So “starfish” is definitely plural, at least in the beginning of the sentence. (And yes, this explanation has been edited to correct my original error. File under: even ninjas write dumb things in the wee hours of the morning.)


Hopefully, the word “it” leaps off the page at you immediately – both of them. Logically, we know that the first “it” needs to refer back to “starfish”, and the second “it” refers back to “arm.” But in its current form, it’s awfully confusing: “it” appears twice in close succession, but the two pronouns refer back to different things? That’s not cool.

And more importantly, “it” can’t refer back to “starfish” anyway, since the beginning of the sentence indicates that “starfish” is plural.

Plus, the meaning of the last part of the underlined portion is funky: the phrase “by the animal overcompensating” suggests that the overcompensation is how the starfish replaces its arm. And that doesn’t actually make sense.

Either way, we can do better than (A).


OK, this “it” looks much better. The word “arm” is the closest potential referent to “it”, so we’re OK here: “… if one arm is lost [the arm] is quickly replaced…” Cool.

I don’t love the use of “with” here, but I can’t see why it’s wrong, exactly. And the meaning makes sense: sometimes, the animal overcompensates and grows an extra arm. That’s kind of creepy from a biological standpoint, but perfectly OK grammatically. “Overcompensating” and “growing” are two parallel actions that are sometimes taken by the animal – and I see no reason why the two actions can’t be parallel.

Let’s keep (B).


The pronouns aren’t horrible here: “it” clearly refers to the arm and “they” presumably refers to starfish. But I think you could make a case that there MIGHT be a pronoun ambiguity issue with “they”, since “arms” is actually the singular noun that’s closest to the pronoun “they.” This isn’t an automatic elimination, since pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule on the GMAT, but it’s something you should always notice. (More on pronoun ambiguity in this YouTube video.)

But here’s the really important part: the use of “by the animal overcompensating” still doesn’t make any sense (see answer choice A above). The starfish doesn’t replace the arm by overcompensating; it just happens to overcompensate sometimes and grow an extra arm.

Because of the meaning issue, (C) can be eliminated.


Again, we could argue that the first “they” isn’t automatically wrong, even though it’s potentially ambiguous – “they” could again refer to “arms” or “starfish.” But the second “they” is absolute nonsense, since “arm” is a singular noun in this particular chunk of the sentence. So (D) is gone, too.


This is awf
ully tempting, and I don’t think that there are any DEFINITE reasons to prefer (E) over (B). But there are a bunch of things that make (B) very, very slightly better.
Let’s line this one up with (B) to make it easier to compare them:

(B) one arm is lost it is quickly replaced, with the animal sometimes overcompensating and
(E) they lose one arm it is quickly replaced, sometimes with the animal overcompensating,

So we have three meaningful differences here, and none of them are smoking guns, but all of them seem to point in the same direction.

In that first chunk of the sentence, the big difference is that (E) uses the pronoun “they”, which is potentially ambiguous, since it could refer back to “starfish” or “arms” – and since “arms” is the most recent plural, you could argue that “they” is a legit problem here. Honestly, I’m not completely convinced by this – there are plenty of official SC questions with similar ambiguities in the correct answers. But in this case, the pronoun issue gives me a very slight preference for (B).

Second, we have some funny business with the placement of the word “sometimes.” The thing that “sometimes” happens is “overcompensating”, so it makes sense to have “sometimes” right next to that word. Is it totally wrong to say “sometimes with the animal overcompensating”? Nope. But again, I’d have a very slight preference for (B) based on the placement of “sometimes.”

And the third thing? In (B), “overcompensating” and “growing” are two parallel actions. In other words, the animal sometimes does two things: it overcompensates and grows an extra arm or two. That makes enough sense. In (E), “growing” has been turned into a modifier (“sometimes with the animal overcompensating, growing an extra arm or two”), and I’m not sure that it’s wrong, but it seems a little bit odd to me: when do you ever see an "-ing" participle modifying another "-ing" participle? Meaning-wise, I suppose you could argue that “growing” tells us extra information about when happens when the animal is “overcompensating”, but I think it makes more sense to keep the two actions (“growing” and “overcompensating”) parallel.

Honestly, I don’t think that any of these three issues are crystal-clear, slam-dunk reasons to eliminate (E). If I were seeing this question on an actual exam for the very first time, I’d say a quick prayer to the GMAT gods before picking (B) and moving on -- but at least I'd be comforted by the notion that all three of those little issues point in half-assed unison toward (B).

Is this always the case? I feel as though I came across an official problem in which this was NOT the case, but I could just be going crazy haha

Hi experts, GMATNinja MartyTargetTestPrep AjiteshArun egmat

I have a quick question on an explanation provided by an external source (and written above). Within my analysis for answer choice E, I have the following:

(2) in an if X (then) Y structure, if X and Y are clauses, the 2nd subject pronoun in Y should refer to the subject in X (e.g., ”if they (starfish) lose one arm, [then] it (one arm) is quickly replaced” – the “it” should refer back to starfish in some way, not the arm)

Is this always the case? I feel as though I came across an official problem in which this was NOT the case, but I could just be going crazy haha

Hello GMATNinja

With regard to the confusion between choice B and E, I have a small query. I ended up choosing E for the following reasons:
1) they is not ambiguous as 'arms' is in the modifier section.
2) I saw overcompensating as a gerund and the ',' as 'by'.

Am I completely off the mark in my conceptual understanding here?

Of course, I see how B is a great choice- and a grammatically correct choice- as well, but I was looking for better clarity in my understanding of B vs E here.

Thanks in advance
NikhilST

GMATNinja

In your post on answer C
The pronouns aren’t horrible here: “it” clearly refers to the arm and “they” presumably refers to starfish. But I think you could make a case that there MIGHT be a pronoun ambiguity issue with “they”, since “arms” is actually the singular noun that’s closest to the pronoun “they.” This isn’t an automatic elimination, since pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule on the GMAT, but it’s something you should always notice. (More on pronoun ambiguity in this YouTube video.)

The singular noun is a typo, is it not. are you referring to the arms* that are not in the underlined part of the sentence ( ...five to eight arms". Just as a general concept, is the pronoun always modifying an ante"cedent, as in the modified noun always come before the pronoun in a sentence structure order?

Dear JusTLucK04,
I am happy to respond to your p.m.

I realize this is an official question, but I would call this problem one of GMAC's clunkers. It has a clear answer, but it falls short of the standards that the GMAT normally has on SC. In particular, the "with" + [noun] + [participial phrase] structure, as a substitute for a clause, is often something GMAC has considered wrong in other, better written questions, but here it is simply unavoidable. To umeshpatil, I would say: in the active voice, neither "with" nor "by" is ideal; for a new action, ideally we should have a whole new clause.

First of all, the first part is more elegant in (B):
(B) one arm is lost it is quickly replaced = concise and elegant
(E) they lose one arm it is quickly replaced = awkward
The former focuses exclusively on one subject, "one arm;" it has rhetorical focus. The latter jumps back and forth between two subjects --- the "starfish" and the "one arm." If (E) were entirely active, "if they lose one arm, they replace it," then there would be a consistent subject and consistent active voice. As it stands, (E) juxtaposes two subjects and also juxtaposes active vs. passive voice, all in a tiny clause. It's very awkward.

One crucial split in this sentence is the placement of the word "sometimes" --- exactly what should this word modify? We are already talking about the event in which the starfish loses an arm. Obviously, if the arm is replace, the animal is always the one who replaces it. The "sometimes" refers to the events in which multiple arms replace a single arm --- that sometimes happens. The placement in (E),
(E) ... sometimes with the animal overcompensating ...
suggests that sometimes the animal's action replaces the arm, and sometimes is something other than the animal replacing the arm. That's nonsensical. By contrast, (B) has:
(B) ... with the animal sometimes overcompensating and ...
Yes. It's the overcompensating that happens only sometimes, but it is always the action of the animal.

Finally, for the split at the end: this is one respect in which (B) is not ideal. I think it is awkward to put those two participles in parallel, "overcompensating and growing ..." Really, those are not two separate actions. Instead, the latter is an explanation of the former: what do we mean that starfish "overcompensates"? We mean that the starfish sometimes grows extra arms. It is an explanation of the same action, not a new action. Therefore, I think putting the two participles in parallel is less than ideal. It would be much better to give them the relationship that (E) has: "overcompensating, [that is to say] growing ..."

So (B) is the best answer, but it is not ideal. In fact, the entire question is not ideal, and it's no surprise that the GMAT got rid of it in its current material.

Let me know if anyone has any further questions.
Mike