The first detailed study of magpie attacks in Australia indicates that

Hello himadeepm,

Allow me to help you with this one. The response will also help pruekv as I received the same query from this user as well.

There is absolutely no ambiguity in the usage of the pronoun "they" in answer choices A, B, and C because the pronoun is followed by its logical and grammatical antecedent write after: 98 percent of men and 75 percent of women.

Logically, it only makes sense to say that by the time these men and women reached their adulthood, they were already attacked by the birds.

Grammatically, the phrase "by the time they had reached/reached adulthood" is a prepositional phrase modifier because it starts with the preposition "by". When placed at the beginning of a clause, the prepositional phrases modify the following clause. So, the pronoun they in this modifier grammatically connects with the subject of the clause 98 percent of men and 75 percent of women. Therefore, there is no ambiguity whatsoever in what "they" refers to in the first three choices.


himadeepm, it is a myth that pronouns cannot appear before the nouns they refer to. Please read our detailed article on myths related to the usage of the pronoun in this link: https://gmatclub.com/forum/pronouns-debunking-popular-myths-intro-160811.html


Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha

Hi EducationAisle

In option D, apart from other mistakes, Do we have any concurrence issue while using "were born" and "were attacked" ? I read it in a way that "act of birth" and "act of attacking" was wrongly put forward as a simultaneous action, and hence wrong.

Do you think we can use this logic here?

Before Expert reply, I would like to share my thoughts.

I don't think we can use such a logic to discard this option.
( usually when I am in confusion, I think with simple examples)
Example: I wore the clothes that were in almirah.
It means at certain point in past I wore some clothes . Which cloths? The clothes that were in almirah at that point of time.

What can I conclude ?
blue part only gives me information about clothes.
Now I can make other similar examples:
The boy that was born in village won the competition .
It doesn't mean born and won happened at the same time.

That xx phrase only gives me information about the boy. Nothing about simultaneous action unless i write as below:
The boy was born in village and won the competition .--> now the meaning is absurd



Similarly , 98 percent of men and 75 percent of women that were born in the country were attacked by the birds by the time they reach adulthood
that's my main subject and main verb.
Now I can identify mistakes .

I hope it is clear.

Hi Mayank, it is important that we don't overdo these concepts .

We can definitely use simple past, to depict two events that happened concurrently in the past. For example:

When British ruled India, India's economy suffered significantly.

Notice that British ruling India and India's economy suffering significantly were concurrent (simultaneous) events and hence, we depict simple past to depict both the events.

However, the reverse is not necessarily true: when two events are expressed in simple past, they need not necessarily have happened simultaneously.

For example:

I met Peter, who was born in 1996.

The above is perfectly valid. Notice that the act of my meeting Peter and the act of Peter being born in 1996, were obviously not simultaneous.

So, context is the king.

Hi MartyTargetTestPrep @ianstewart- Just from a general knowledge perspective, i was wondering what is the difference between these 3 sentences.




The context in all three cases is that the present tense is today (Jan 24th 2022) and i turned 20, lets say in 1990.

Hello jabhatta2,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, in the first sentence the use of the simple present tense seems to suggest that killing 10 chickens by the time you reach your 20s is a statement of universal fact; in other words, it is true for everyone that they kill 10 chickens by the time the reach their 20s.

The second and third sentences incorrectly use the present perfect ("have killed") and simple past ("killed") tense verbs, respectively, to refer to an action that will end by a particular time in the future; please remember, the future perfect tense (marked by the use of “will have”) is used for referring to an action that will end by a particular point in time in future.

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

egmat
I agree with sentence construction of option-B, but I am doubtful regarding option -A here,

option-A : by the time they reach adulthood, 98% of men and 75% of women have been attacked by the birds.
As (by the time they reach adulthood) denotes a event in future, the following event should be in future perfect ??

refer to this Q :


here, OA is option-C

An example (presented by egmat mentor) quotes that

please clarify my doubt: we use future perfect for such cases or present perfect?

The (a) version is not about the future. In other words, it's not a prediction. It's a statement reporting what generally occurs in the present.

So, the "by the time" modifier uses the present tense to communicate that the these events occur in the present, and then the main clause uses the present perfect to describe what occurs "by the time they reach adulthood."

AndrewN,

Can you share your views on option E?

Thanks

Hello krndatta,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, Option E suffers from a bit of modifier ambiguity; due to the placement of the "by the time they reached adulthood" after "born in the country", the sentence formed by Option E can be interpreted to imply that the men and women were born in Australia by the time they reached adulthood.

This meaning is technically correct, but it is highly convoluted and makes Option E an inferior choice.

Further, Option E uses the needlessly wordy phrase "who were born in the country", leading to awkwardness and redundancy.

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

Hi,

The reason I crossed out A,B, and C at first was because in the phrase "The first detailed study of magpie attacks in Australia indicates that by the time they had reached adulthood," it seems like the THEY is referring to the magpie attacks, which would be illogical.

Would appreciate any guidance GMATNinja egmat

please help me with with B and E. what does 'WHO' modify in option B and E ?

daagh
KarishmaB

Hello AnujL,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, in both Options "who" modifies "98 percent of men and 75 percent of women".

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

In option (B), 'who' after the comma is modifying the people mentioned before so one is likely to think that it is modifying '98 percent of men and 75 percent of women' and is telling us something more about them. It is a non essential, not restrictive modifier. But that is not what we wanted.

We want to restrict men and women to those who were born in the country. We are talking about only those men and women. Of those men and women, 98% men and 75% women had been attacked. So we cannot use a comma before 'who.'

Better yet, we can just use the past participial phrase 'born in the country' to modify 'men and women' as done in option (C).
Though the use of 'who' without comma in option (E) is acceptable too. Option (E) has other problems which make option (C) the answer.

Hello sseth8,

Thank you for the question, and apologies for the late revert.

I am afraid your analysis is not correct. The pronoun "they" in the structure does not refer to a noun already mentioned in the preceding part of the sentence but a noun that appears after the noun. In this sentence, the pronoun "they" correctly refers to the plural noun "98 percent of men and 75 percent of women".


Takeaway: An antecedent of a pronoun can appear after the pronoun. Choice C is the correct answer here, and the usage is validated.


Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha

GMATNinja can you please explain what is the problem in Option E in terms of meaning ?

After eliminating all the options we are left with option C and E . I chose C because it follows the past perfect tense rule and is better than E in terms of meaning and grammar . Still want to very clear on what grounds are we eliminating E . Would really appreciate your help.

Thanks in Advance!

(C) and (E) are disturbingly similar, and neither of those options have any clear-cut "errors", unfortunately. So all we can do is compare the differences between those two options, and see if we can spot enough meaning issues to prefer one over the other.

Here they are again:

Difference #1: placement of "by the time they reached adulthood"

In (C), this modifier appears at the beginning of the "that" clause, making it pretty clear that it modifies the entire ensuing clause ("98 percent of men and 75 percent of women born in the country had been attacked by the birds").

In (E), things are a little fuzzier. First of all, why is there no comma after "adulthood"? The omission of a second comma makes it look as though "had been attacked by the birds" is part of the "by the time they..." modifier. Sure, the reader can figure out the intended meaning, but a second comma would make things a bit more clear. That gives us one tiny vote against (E).

More significantly, a reader might mistakenly think that the "by the time they..." modifier describes the preceding "who" clause ("who were born in the country"). Again, the reader can figure out the logical meaning, but that meaning is more clearly expressed in (C).

Does that make (E) absolutely WRONG? Maybe, maybe not -- but in terms of this particular difference, (C) is a little better.

Difference #2: "born in the country" vs "who were born in the country"

Both options are probably acceptable. But if so, why go with the wordier one? "Wordiness" is rarely a reliable decision point, but in this case it might give us a very tiny vote in favor of (C). Like, really tiny -- but it's one of the few differences between the two options, so it's worth mentioning.

And that's all we have to work with! Based mainly on the first difference discussed above, (C) is a slightly better option.

Remember, GMAT SC is not about finding four WRONG sentences (with definitive errors) and one RIGHT sentence (with no definitive errors). Instead, it's about choosing the BEST option out the five available.

In this case, (C) wins -- but admittedly not by much.

I hope that helps!