The Edicts of Aso contain writings on several Buddist themes by Aso:

the source of this question is 800score. I will post the official explanation by the end of the day.

I am not sure if this is can be termed as a standard question.

A. The Edicts of Aso contain writings on several Buddist themes by Aso: his principles, an explanation of how he intended to spread Buddism, and creating social welfare, accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism.
B. The Edicts of Aso, accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism , contain writings on several Buddist themes by Aso: his principles, an explanation of how he intended to spread Buddism, and creating social welfare.
C. Accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism, the Edicts of Aso , contain writings on several Buddist themes by Aso: his principles, an explanation of how he intended to spread Buddism, and the creation of social welfare. (I think comma is typo)
D. Containing writings on several Buddist themes by Aso, and accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism, the Edicts of Aso contain his principles, an explanation of how he intended to spread Buddism, and the creation of social welfare.

- I didn't understand why there is ,and
",and" is used in two cases:
1) More than 2 items in the list.
2) very long clause in the list.

E. The Edicts of Aso, accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism, contain writings on several Buddist themes by Aso: his principles, explaining how he intended to spread Buddism, and creating social well fare.

if C is indeed as is written then there can be no explanation to justify the presence of comma. it is plain wrong .


"AND" is justified here (you can put two modifiers in the beginning of the clause separated by a comma) but then there is a larger problem with D .the meaning of D is wrong because effectively D is trying to say: "Containing writings on several Buddist themes by Aso, the Edicts of Aso contain his principles...."----------->this does not make sense for precisely the same reason which i had pointed out some day back (regarding modifiers in one of your post)

AND is ok I was worried about COMMA + AND.

I agree with the modifier issue in option D)

this is also oki .there is no problem with this construction either !!

here is the original explanation

(C) This question tests misplaced modifiers, parallelism, and wordiness. (A) contains a misplaced modifier: ‘accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism’ which should be placed much closer to ‘the Edicts of Aso’ to which it refers. (A) also contains improper parallelism. Items in a list is a case for paralleli sm and not all items
in this sentence match grammatically: his principles (noun), an explanation (noun)…, and creating (verb)… (B) fixes the modifier issue, but still contains improper parallelism. (D) is redundant: ‘containing writings…’ and ‘the Edicts of Aso contain.’ The sentence could be worded better. (E) contains improper parallelism, adding
‘explaining how’ into the mix. (C) contains better wording than (D) and contains no grammatical errors.

Considering this explanation

comma in C) seems a typo.

this explanation does NOT MAKE C CORRECT . the fact is that we CANNOT have a construction where subject and verb are separated by a COMMA, unless of course that COMMA serves some other purpose

i agree with you aditya, (even i picked option D) that's the reason, i posted this question in this forum for discussion. Also, i have double checked the options, they are correct the way they are written. Can any expert please comment on this question. ??

Selected C because of the parallelism and modifier issues. Moreover, isn't it redundant to say Edicts of Aso contain several bla bla bla of Aso?
Well, if it's edicts of Aso, it is clearly smth of Aso
rejected D because of 2 modifiers in the beginning, since they are not parallel to each other, although they do refer to the same subject.

This is a typical case of parallelism and "meaning". The presence of comma before "and" in the list is a big clue. It took a while to solve but worth it.

The meaning by splitting the sentence:
1. The Edicts of Aso is accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism.
2. The Edicts of Aso contain writings on
a. several Buddist themes by Aso: his principles, an explanation of how he intended to spread Buddism
b. the creation of social welfare

Generally, the colon can also be used to emphasize a phrase or single word at the end of a sentence. Here it is used to emphasize "the themes". Moreover COMMA + AND cannot finish this simple list when considering parallelism. Hence, logically, it should be connecting another clause.

Answer choices:
a. Incorrect as the modifier "accepted by many as the first evidence of Buddism" is incorrectly modifying. Moreover COMMA + AND is incorrect for the list.
b. "and creating social welfare" is not parallel to the list.
c. Correct answer. COMMA + AND connects "the creation of social welfare" to the earlier clause.
d. The themes <-> his principles - connection is lost - change in meaning
e. same as B

arichinna Agree even I didn't catch ", and" useage right away and it took me a moment to realize. Also, I have listed the three different uses of and. The first two are common its the third one that throws me away sometimes.

There are three uses of AND:

1. IC, FANBOYS IC
2. In a list of things. Such as I want chips, coke, fruits, and chocolate.
2. After the btw clause/information eg. I want to invite John, who is chairman of Nordic Capital, and Mike, who is the CEO of Pepsi, to my retirement ceremony.

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