The hognose snake puts on an impressive bluff, hissing and rearing bac

Question

The hognose snake puts on an impressive bluff, hissing and rearing back, broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigning repeated strikes, but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and eventually, if its pursuer is not cowed by the performance, will fall over and play dead.

(A) broadens the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does, feigning repeated strikes, but, having no dangerous fangs and no venom,

(B) broadens the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigns repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom,

(C) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigning repeated strikes, but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and

(D) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigns repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, and

(E) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does, feigning repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, and

daagh · Answer

The hognose snake puts on an impressive bluff, hissing and rearing back, broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigning repeated strikes, but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and eventually, if its pursuer is not cowed by the performance, will fall over and play dead.

In such issues involving list parallelism, the first task is to identify the various arms of the list and determine whether they are parallel in both structure and meaning.
 
In this case, the first main act is the hognose putting on an impressive bluff, a factor described by three examples such as 1.hisssisng and rearing 2. broadening and3. feigning. Then another IC starts with a comma and 'but'. In this light, let's now look at the choices
 
(A) broadens the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does, feigning repeated strikes, but, having no dangerous fangs and no venom,---  'broadens' breaks the parallelism.

(B) broadens the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigns repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, --  'broadens' breaks the parallelism.

(C) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigning repeated strikes, but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and---  correct choice

(D) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigns repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, and --  and feigns breaks the parallelism.

(E) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does, feigning repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, and --  The third arm of the list is not marked with an 'and' to mark the end of the series. In addition, the second part starting with a comma and but is not an IC. It lacks a subject

madhukaramar · Answer

Hello Experts -

One question. Kindly help -

Is "eventually, if its pursuer is not cowed by the performance, will fall over and play dead." as independent clause here??

Thanks, 
Madhukar Amar

GMATNinja · Answer

An independent clause, by definition, can stand on its own as a complete sentence. In this case, the verb phrase, "will fall over and play dead" is an action performed by "the hognose snake," which is the subject mentioned earlier in the sentence. Because the above can't stand on its own, we know it isn't an independent clause.

Generally speaking, whenever we see the construction "IF + clause," we'll need an independent clause to follow in order to have a complete sentence. For example, "If Henry accidentally feeds his daughter to a bear, his wife will be angry." Here, "his wife will be angry" is an independent clause and can stand on its own. Notice that if we remove the subject from that clause, the sentence can no longer stand on its own: "If Henry accidentally feeds his daughter to a bear, will be angry."

I hope that helps!

anshulvnd5 · Answer

Sir,

In option C, doesnt 'IT' can refer to snake or cobra( pronoun error issue ). or is it a rule that Subject(pronoun) of second independent clause refer back to Subject of first independent clause .

GMATNinja · Answer

As described in this post , the pronoun subject of the second clause doesn't always refer to the subject of the first clause. But if the subject of the second clause is a pronoun, it CAN refer back to the subject of the first clause -- even if there are a ton of other potential referents in the sentence. Unfortunately, there are no ironclad rules governing this situation, so you always want to 1) look for other decision points and 2) compare the remaining options to see whether any make the meaning more/less clear. Remember that there are no black and white rules when it comes to pronoun ambiguity, either. For anybody who didn't already suffer through it, the full webinar on pronouns is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhN_KU1bSKU.

NithishKumar · Answer

GMATNinja  I arrived at C because of the errors in other options but can you explain which structure is parallel to "will fall over and play dead" in second clause in C.

Thank you.

Posted from my mobile device

GMATNinja · Answer

Let's look at the second half of (C) and start stripping out some modifiers:

"..., but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and , eventually, if its pursuer is not cowed by the performance,  will fall over and play dead."

That leaves us with:

"..., but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and will fall over and play dead." Notice that the comma after "venom" is not strictly necessary -- it's simply there for clarity (the GMAT is fairly lenient with this sort of thing, as discussed in  this post ).

Now let's zero in on the parallelism (I'll leave out the aforementioned comma in this stripped down version):

"... it (1) has no dangerous fangs and no venom and (2) will fall over and play dead."

This is basically a parallel list of verbs. The only catch is that we have a "nested" parallel list within both (1) and (2):

(1) "has (a) no dangerous fangs and (b) no venom"
(2) "will (a) fall over and (b) play dead"

With all of the modifiers and different layers of parallelism, the structure of this sentence is complex. However, when you boil it down, you're left with a parallel list of verbs that can be tied back to the subject "it" (which refers to "the hognose snake").

I hope that helps!

lakshya14 · Answer

Is double modifier correct to use ?

GMATGuruNY · Answer

While back-to-back modifiers joined only by a comma are rare, other OAs from GMAC have employed this structure.
Generally, the two modifiers joined by a comma will be PARALLEL IN FORM and will serve the SAME GRAMMATICAL PURPOSE.

OA:   The hognose snake puts on  an impressive bluff,  hissing and rearing back, broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigning repeated strikes  .
Here, the two modifiers in blue are parallel in form.
First modifier: HISSING and REARING
Second modifier: BROADENING and FEIGNING
The parallelism makes it clear that the two modifiers serve the SAME GRAMMATICAL PURPOSE: each refers to the preceding clause in green, expressing HOW the snake puts on a bluff.

Another official example:
  There would be a large number of producing  firms ,  all unfettered by governmental regulations, each seeking to meet consumer needs and wants more successfully than one another . 
Again, the two modifiers in blue are parallel in form.
First modifier:  all  + VERBed + other words
Second modifier:  each  + VERBing + other words
The parallelism makes it clear that the two modifiers serve the SAME GRAMMATICAL PURPOSE: each describes the preceding noun in green.

Vivek1707 · Answer

Hi  GMATNinja

Thank you for your amazing explanation. I wanted to clarify - I understand that the usage of 'but' requires Parallelism on the left side and right side of 'but'. So in this sentence, we have a clause on the left side " The hognose snake ....." but on the right side of 'but' only C has a clause i.e. "it has no ...". Is "clause" but "clause" Parallelism also the correct way to select C ?

GMATNinja · Answer

You're right that all the incorrect answers have faulty parallelism here, but it's not necessarily true that if a clause precedes the parallel marker, one must come after it too.

Take a simple example: Tim  trips  and  falls . We get a clause before "and," but this sentence is fine, because the two actions ("trips" and "falls") are parallel. The way to evaluate this is to see what comes  after  the conjunction, and then go  back  to see if the parallel form shows up earlier. In this case, a verb ("falls") comes after "and", so that's what we're looking for when our eyes drift to the left.

However, If we'd seen a full clause after the conjunction, we'd have looked for a full clause before the conjunction too.

For more on parallelism, check out  this crusty old YouTube video .

I hope that clears things up!

Marcost · Answer

My main problem in this question was vocabulary. I believe many non-native speakers may also have an issue with that.

The words I didn't know what they mean were:

bluff, hissing, rearing back, flesh, feigning and fangs
Hognose (this one may not be as important as the previous)

With this disadvantage, I couldn't define which words requiered to be verbs or -ing modifiers.

I think the only advice about this issue would be to expand my vocabulary. Any coments?

pemathew · Answer

Do options A and B repeat the error in E ? (not having a subject for the clause after  but  )

GMATNinja

GMATNinja · Answer

The absence of a subject in the second clause certainly makes things more confusing in all three options.

After the conjunction in each option, we have a modifying phrase. In (A) we get "having no dangerous fangs..." and in (B) and (E) we get "with no dangerous fangs." Without a new subject, it's really really difficult to see that those modifiers are describing the "hognose snake," which is also performing the subsequent action "will fall over."

So it doesn't really matter whether we call this a definitive grammatical error (because there's no subject for the second clause) or just really darn confusing (because it's nearly impossible to tell that it's the hognose snake that will fall over). Either way: it's pretty bad, right? So, yeah, I think it's fair to say you can kill all three options for that reason.

And if you'd like another reason to get rid of (A) and (B), check out  this post .

I hope that helps!

TheBulgarian · Answer

GMATNinja

Could you please help me understand the use of the last  , and  also highlighted in bold.

I am reading it as another coordinating conjunction which signals to me that another IC follows but the last IC has no clear subject.

Below is my structural breakdown of the sentence.

thangvietnam · Answer

normally, gmat require us to understand meaning and find the meaning error. 
but for this problem, it dose not, though hard, require us to understand meaning
in choice A and B, hissing and rearing is ambiguous because they can modify the preceding verb, "puts on" , or following verb "broadens". so, A and B are gone

in choice D, before "broading" we need "and" because 3 "doing" stand together.
in choice E, we need " and" before "feigning".

it is likely that gmat want us to do this way because many new words are given in this problem

arya251294 · Answer

When we say "broadens", it sounds like that the first task that the snake does is "puts impressive bluff" and the second task is that it "broadens the flesh" which does not make any sense. What makes more sense is the idea that the snake puts impressive bluff, and how exactly does it put impressive bluff is by hissing, rearing, broadening, and feigning.

Hope it makes sense, please correct me if my understanding is not right.

GMATNinja · Answer

We get this question all of the time (i.e.  here  and  here ). The short answer is that (1) you NEED a comma if you are joining two independent clauses with a conjunction, but (2) a comma + conjunction does NOT necessarily need to be following by an independent clause.

The GMAT is actually pretty flexible with comma usage on SC, and it's perfectly acceptable to use extra commas for clarity (i.e. to break up a long, confusing sentence). And that's exactly what we see here in choice (C): like all of the other choices, (C) is obnoxiously long and wordy, and the comma after "no dangerous fangs and no venom" is just there for clarity, to help break up this hot mess of a sentence.

I hope that helps!

Raman109 · Answer

The hognose snake puts on an impressive bluff, hissing and rearing back, broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigning repeated strikes, but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and eventually, if its pursuer is not cowed by the performance, will fall over and play dead.

Option Elimination - 
Basics first - Comma + ING is adverbial. Here, we are trying to explain the "How" part of an action "puts an impressive bluff."
So the basic structure here is Clause, modifiers, but clause, and clause.

(A) broadens the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does, feigning repeated strikes, but, having no dangerous fangs and no venom, - "broadens" is a verb and can be parallel to "puts" but that doesn't make sense. And also modifier parallelism is also broken; we have a clause, ING modifier, verb, and ING modifier. Moreover, after but and before "and," we need a clause for parallelism. But we have a modifier after but.

(B) broadens the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigns repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, - again, this has verbs "broadens" and feigns" instead of the ING verbal to explain "How." Moreover, after but we have a modifier and after "and" we have a clause. Not good.

(C) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigning repeated strikes, but it has no dangerous fangs and no venom, and - Perfect. It refers to "the hognose snake."

(D) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does and feigns repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, and - same issues as explained earlier.

(E) broadening the flesh behind its head the way a cobra does, feigning repeated strikes, but with no dangerous fangs and no venom, and - same issues "but" and "and."

The hognose snake puts on an impressive bluff, hissing and rearing bac

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The hognose snake puts on an impressive bluff, hissing and rearing bac

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