ykaiim wrote:
The typical military coup fails relatively bloodlessly, amassing little support, collapsing within hours of its first public claim to power, but, having usually gotten the full attention of a country's leaders, eventually, once an initial retaliation period ends, the ideology behind the coup makes subtle inroads in the nation's government.
(A) support, collapsing within hours of its first public claim to power, but, having usually gotten the full attention of a country's leaders,
(B) support, collapses within hours of its first public claim to power, but with the usual full attention of a country's leaders gotten,
(C) support and collapsing within hours of its first public claim to power, but it usually gets the full attention of a country's leaders, and
(D) support and collapsing within hours of its first public claim to power, but with the usual full attention of a country's leaders, and
(E) support, collapses within hours of its first making a public claim to power, but with the usual full attention of a country's leaders, and
OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
C
This is a long, complicated sentence. The first order of business is to make sense of all the commas and short phrases. One place to start might be the modifying phrase "amassing little support, collapsing within hours. . ." Both of those things refer to the coup's failure. That means the modifier is in the right place, but since there are no other items in the list, it would be preferable to condense both into one modifier, as in choice (C): "amassing little support and collapsing within hours. . ." This makes (C) a strong possibility.
(B) and (E) use "collapses" instead of "collapsing", making it seem like "fails" and "collapses" are parallel items in the same list. If the typical military coup "fails", does it also "collapse?" Yes, but that doesn't mean "collapses" should begin a parallel list item. "Collapses" would be redundant as an item of such a list; instead, it modifies the failure by further specifying what is meant. Again, this makes (C) look better, as it includes "collapsing" in a modifier.
(A) is clumsy due to the phrase "having usually gotten". With no subject (compare to "it" in choice (C)), this sentence implies that it is "the ideology" that has gotten the attention. That isn't what the sentence means. (D)'s problem is that the comma, followed by "but", implies that what follows is a complete sentence. For comparison, (C) is a complete sentence after the" , but". (C), then, is the only correct choice.