The diet of the ordinary Greek in classical times was largely vegetari

Thanks for reply in that way. Before I saw your answer, I couldn't understand but when you rewrite the main sentence I understand clearly.
If you put the sentence:

The diet of the ordinary Greek in classical times was largely vegetarian—vegetables, fresh cheese, oatmeal, and meal cakes, and the diet of the ordinary Greek in classical times with meat as a rarity.

It really makes sense now

I believed that the sentence is presenting two facts only and thus chose B. For this reason i eliminated E which i thought is more or less similar sounding to C.

So, how do i ensure that i don't fall for wrong meaning(sentence intent).??
Can the option E be chosen based purely on grammatical structure(read technical reasons) as has been pointed by experts, even if it is about facts.??

The diet of the ordinary Greek in classical times was largely vegetarian—vegetables, fresh cheese, oatmeal, and meal cakes, and meat rarely.

(A) and meat rarely

This one does not follow parallelism. The correct parallelism should be A, B, C, and D or A, B, C and D, and E. But based on the meaning, this problem should follow the first one, but it fails to do so.

(B) and meat was rare

[color=#ffff0000]I chose this one as my answer because I thought they could be separate sentences. Grammatically, it is correct. However, meaning has changed. B is saying that meat is scarce but the intended meaning is that they seldom eat meat.[/color]

(C) with meat as rare

Notice that the "as" here means comparison, not "be" something (like the one in E), then there should be something else to be compared i.e. meat needs to be compared to something else: meat is as rare as... but we cannot find anything to be compared with because all other veggies are rather prevalent.

(D) meat a rarity

This would be an appositive, and appositive should describe a noun before it. For example: She is Emily, a beautiful girl. Here, "a beautiful girl" is an appositive and modifies "Emily". Let's come back to the problem. Since "meat a rarity" is appositive, it must modify a noun before it as well. However, the noun before it is not meat. Therefore, wrong.

(E) with meat as a rarity

Yes, a comma before preposition is allowed. And here, rarity refers to meat.

c,d,e on what bases did we eliminate these?

I think this is explained in detail in many posts on previous two pages. Please re-read the thread. Hope it helps.

The diet of the ordinary Greek in classical times was largely vegetarian—vegetables, fresh cheese, oatmeal, and meal cakes, and meat rarely.

The list is connected by commas and "and", so the answer could not repeat "and"

(A) and meat rarely wrong because of above reason
(B) and meat was rare wrong because of above reason
(C) with meat as rare as should go with a clause
(D) meat a rarity no connecting word
(E) with meat as a rarity good enough

Request Expert Reply:
Hi honorable experts,
MartyTargetTestPrep, GMATNinja, GMATGuruNY, AjiteshArun, VeritasPrepHailey, BrightOutlookJenn,
What role does the highlighted part play? Is it modifier or anything else? If it is modifier, which one is modified by it?
I'm passing hard time to comprehend it!
Thanks_-

I'm eagerly expecting feedback from my honorable experts! Appreciating your help, experts.

VeritasKarishma mam kindly explain how E is correct

Look at the non underlined part first:

The diet ... was largely vegetarian—vegetables, fresh cheese, oatmeal, and meal cakes, ...

The list talks about what all constituted the vegetarian aspect: A, B, C and D.
The list is complete. So options (A) and (B) which seem to add meat to the list too by putting an "and" before it are incorrect.

As an aside, the sentence mentions that on rare occasions, meat was also served. This is done with the help of a prepositional modifier.

"with meat as a rarity"

"as" used with a noun gives you the role or purpose of the noun.

e.g. They appointed Kelly as the manager.

Then you need a noun "rarity", not "rare" (which is an adjective). Hence (C) is incorrect.

We do use adjectives with "as" in comparisons - "the meat was as rare as ..."

Option (D) gives "meat a rarity" joined with a comma. You can join a noun with a comma to give an appositive (rename the noun appearing before). Here, that is not taking place so (D) is not correct.

Answer (E)

VeritasKarishma Mam Thank you so much for indepth explanation as always....Now its cent percent clear

Hi AjiteshArun

I was attracted to option A.
The diet of the ordinary Greek in classical times was largely vegetarian—vegetables, fresh cheese, oatmeal, and meal cakes, and meat rarely.


1. Could you please explain why it leads to unidiomatic? (sorry , if I am missing some easy point)
When I tried to understand the meaning, I found :
Diet is vegetarian largely and meat rarely.
- vegetarian and meat-both nouns
- I can say: I eat vegetarian , or I can say I eat meat, so why not vegetarian and meat can be parallel?

2. How to write the sentence idiomatic by keeping the same meaning?
Diet is vegetarian largely and <?? > rarely.


Please suggest AjiteshArun

Thanks!

Hi mSKR,

No, you're not missing some easy point. Idiomatic usage is hard.

I'm not sure how the GMAT would fix this issue while keeping the and, but if I had to give it a shot, I'd probably go for something like (2) below:

1. The diet is meat rarely.
2. The diet rarely includes meat.

So "the diet was largely vegetarian and rarely included meat" may be one way to fix that option. Don't worry too much about this though. Tweaking official questions like this is a risky thing to do.

Thanks AjiteshArun

I have one doubt:
In general ( Sorry doubt arose from other post)
Can rather than/instead be used as parallel markers in the same way ( and )?
I think should be , but I don't know why others mentioned can not.

Please give expert opinion.

GMATNinja KarishmaB
The diet of the ordinary Greek in classical times was largely vegetarian—vegetables, fresh cheese, oatmeal, and meal cakes, with meat as a rarity.

In the above sentence, the list is modifying the notion that the Greek diet in classical times was largely vegetarian. Thereafter, we have been provided with the examples of the vegetarian things that were commonly consumed in that era. How does the inclusion of meat in the list that exemplifies vegetarian staples makes sense?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Option (E) does not include meat in the list. Only options (A) and (B) do that with the use of "and"

The diet ... was largely vegetarian—vegetables, fresh cheese, oatmeal, and meal cakes, ...

The list talks about what all constituted the vegetarian aspect: A, B, C and D.
The list is complete.

As an aside, the sentence mentions that on rare occasions, meat was also served. This is done with the help of a prepositional modifier.

"with meat as a rarity" - This is not a part of the list of "largely veg diet".

Hence (E) is correct.

Hello NareshGargMBA,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, the sentence says that the diet was largely vegetarian, meaning that it was mostly, but not entirely, vegetarian. This is why the phrase "with meat as a rarity" is used - to convey that meat was eaten, but only rarely.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team