Bunuel wrote:
The infected people came from various social classes and parts of the city –
a reminder that epidemics do not discriminate and are not just a natural result of poverty.A. a reminder that epidemics do not discriminate and are not just a natural result of poverty.
B. a reminder that epidemics do not discriminate, resulting not just naturally from poverty.
C. reminders that epidemics do not discriminate and not resulting naturally from poverty.
D. a reminder that epidemics do not discriminate and not resulting naturally from poverty.
E. reminders that epidemics do not discriminate and are not just a result of natural poverty.
VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL SOLUTION:
The most obvious decision point to start with in this question is between the singular “a reminder” and the plural “reminders.” The question you should ask yourself as you choose between them is what the word refers to – is it the people themselves or the fact they came from various social classes? A look at the rest of the sentence shows that the logical answer is that the word refers to the fact that the people came from various areas, not the people themselves, meaning that you need an answer with the singular “a reminder.” Based on this, you can eliminate (C) and (E).
The second decision point you can look to is one of parallelism. Because you have a list of two items that the word “epidemics” acts upon, you need to have the words that logically follow epidemics to be in the same form. In this case, this means that you need “epidemics do” (a noun followed by a verb) to match with “epidemics are” (a noun followed by a verb) in choice (A). Since (B) and (D) do not follow this construction, they can be eliminated.
Choice (A) is correct.