KittyDoodles
Hi Experts,
I had rejected Option A & C because "and it weighs" seems parallel to "it claims". Thus, we get a "The electronics company has unveiled what it (the world???s smallest network digital camcorder) weighs" which doesn't make sense.
Please advise whether my reasoning is valid.
Thanks
Kitty
Not really. When the same pronoun appears in two distinct clauses (like the two instances of "it" here), the two occurrences of the pronoun can stand for two different nouns—as long as there's sufficient clarity in context. (NB: You won't have to worry about the latter point for the GMAT, which does not explicitly test pronoun ambiguity.)
What
is problematic in that part of choices A and C is the use of "and
IT weighs..." That's a complete sentence (independent clause) following "and"—meaning that the other parallel part has to be another independent clause. The only such clause available is the one that begins the sentence ("The electronics company has unveiled...").
Putting these two clauses in parallel ("The electronics company has unveiled ...
AND it weighs...") is nonsense.
The ideas that SHOULD be parallel are the given facts about the length and width of the device. This is just basic parallelism—and it's all you need to solve the problem, because only choice D does it correctly (with two verbs introducing the two physical measurements)!
The two choices with "and" don't make sense for the reasons explained above. Neither do the two choices that write "weighing" as a
comma _ING modifier, since the device's weight cannot sensibly modify a statement about its length.