rnn wrote:
aside from pronoun ambiguity "they" in option A... is there any other reason why A is incorrect?
There are a couple of other problems with (A).
First, "up to 40 percent" is better than "
in up to 40 percent". With the addition of the word "in", it sounds as though the consumption occurs
within the elderly people, and that doesn't quite make sense. Choice (E) makes it clear that some portion of elderly people do the consuming. (A), on the other hand, seems to indicate that the consumption is an independent process occurring inside the elderly people... (E) is better!
Next, compare "[some elderly people] consume insufficient amounts of one or more essential nutrients" (choice E) to "the consumption of one or more essential nutrients is insufficient" (choice A). In (A), "insufficient" modifies
consumption, and in (E), "insufficient" modifies
amounts of one or more essential nutrients. There isn't anything inherently wrong with saying "insufficient consumption", but choice (E) makes it clear that those elderly people are not consuming a large enough quantity of those essential nutrients. So that's another small vote in favor of (E).
Last but certainly not least, the parallelism makes much more sense in (E) than in (A). In (E), it's clear that the elderly people perform two actions: they "consume insufficient amounts..." or they "have deficient levels of these nutrients." (A) is much more confusing: why use the passive structure "the consumption is... insufficient" when we could just construct the sentence with two parallel verbs?
So (E) is a much better choice. I hope this helps!
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