She argues THAT the agency acts WITH reckless abandon AND WITH disrega

Question

This is an example of the MGMAT SC:

She argues THAT the agency acts WITH reckless abandon AND WITH disregard for human life AND property, AND THAT it should therefore be shut down.

According to the book, prepositional phrases should be parallel when there is the word "and". In this sentence, we can see this rule in "WITH reckless abandon AND WITH disregard". However, why don't they use the word "for" before "property"?. "For human life" is a preprositional phrase; therefore, those parallel phrases should be "for human life and FOR property".

How could you know when the sentence is listing only nouns and not prepositional phrases (when there is a preposition in the sentence)?

Please explain. Thanks!

dimitri92 · Answer

She argues 
|THAT the agency acts 
|..|WITH reckless abandon 
|..|AND 
|..|WITH disregard ----------> if we omitt  WITH  here, it will still be correct
|....|FOR human life 
|....|AND 
|....|(FOR) property, ------->here  for  is understood and can be omitted
|AND 
|THAT it should therefore be shut down.

HTH

metallicafan · Answer

Could you elaborate more the highlited parts in red, please?

maddy2u · Answer

I believe that both Human Life and Property have to be parallel to each other. To make it so, we can either write it as "For Human Life and For Property" or simply state it as "For Human Life and Property" - implying that disregard is for both of them. The "For" is not required in front of Property as it is implied in the above sentence.

Am not sure if there is a hard and fast rule for this; Its generally the way it sounds. Maybe the Experts can help further on this

metallicafan · Answer

Guys, I think I got it 8-)

The sentence repeats WITH in "reckless abandon" and "disregard" in order to emphasize that both elements are related with "human life" and "property". If the sentence doesn't do this, maybe you could understand that only the last element (disregard) is related with "human life" and "property". If there is an instructor, please confirm. Thanks!

dimitri92 · Answer

there's no "start-marker" for parallelism ... it is not exactly the same structure as ... 'not only ... but also' ... for which, you're bound to follow the structure .... so we can start the parallelism wherever it's convenient to fit the structure of the sentence.

John was interested in English but not Economics
John was interested in English but not in Economics 
John was interested in English but not interested in Economics 
 
all three are acceptable.

HTH

metallicafan · Answer

Thanks dimitri! ...and what do you think about my explanation? (quoted above)

dimitri92 · Answer

alright, let's remove WITH and see how it looks like

She argues
|THAT the agency acts WITH 
|..|reckless abandon
|..|AND
|..|disregard FOR 
|....|human life
|....|AND
|....|property
|AND
|THAT it should therefore be shut down.

the above sentence looks fine .... WITH does not emphasize on anything ... it just serves as the 'marker' for for parallelism ... however, i do think that THAT is required in 'THAT it should therefore be shutdown' to separate the last sentence from 'human life AND property'

HTH

pinchharmonic · Answer

Incorrect Sentence:
 She argues that the agency acts with disregard for human life AND property AND reckless abandon AND it should therefore be shut down.

Correct Sentence:
She argues THAT the agency acts WITH reckless abandon AND WITH disregard  for human life AND property , AND THAT it should therefore be shutdown.

I understand the explanation for the correct sentence, but what puzzles me is the bolded part

couldn't/shouldn't it be
 
disregard for human life and for property

That sounds strange, but since human life / property should be parallel, and I notice that "for human life" is a prepositional phrase, shouldn't property be a prepositional pharse too?

thank you

vivesomnium · Answer

There are two type of parallel markers: two- part and one-part
so something like..'not only x but also y', is a 2-part || marker and x and y have to be absolutely ||
But in one-part || marker such as 'and', you have more flexibility.

'Lions live in forests  and  caves' is correct, just as 'Lions live in forests  and  in caves' is correct.

This is because with 'and' you have a choice in making the parts parallel. The part before and can be considered as 'in forests' as well as 'forests'. i.e. you have choice to consider the noun or the prepositional phrase; both will be correct. Depending on what you choose the second correctly parallel part can be 'caves' or 'in caves'

similarly, it can be for human life and property or for human life and for property. You have that flexibility 
Hope this helps.

pinchharmonic · Answer

vivesomnium,

thanks great explanation. I'm just starting on Sentence Correction, and I may eventually figure this out in the Manhattan stuff, but how much flexibility do you have with the one-part marker?

you've showed that a noun vs. a preposition before a noun works, are there others?

immaculatesahai · Answer

Rule: Some verb or forms derived from verbs have more than one word: was opening, can lose, to increase. You can often split apart these expressions, so that the first word or words count across all elements.

MichaelS · Answer

The simple answer: like the  to  in an infinitive, and like auxiliary verbs, prepositions can be distributed over parallel nouns, or repeated. That is, the nouns in the prepositional phrase can be the parallel elements, or the prepositional phrases can be the parallel elements. The same is true of other parts of speech. Examples will make this clearer, and may allow you to spot a pattern. Parallel elements are in bold below.

INFINITIVES:
 I like to  dance  and  yodel .
I like  to dance  the ländler, a traditional folk dance of my Hessian forebears, and  to yodel .

See the difference? If the elements are several words apart, the correct answer will repeat the  to .

PREPOSITIONS
 I had trouble with questions  16  and  22 .
I had trouble with  question   16  and  question   22 .
I had trouble  with question 16 , a complicated combined rate problem involving a head start, and  with question 22 , an overlapping-set problem.   
I ran out of time  after question 16 , but  during question 22 .
 I  stumbled   over question 16 , but  raced   through question 22 .

See the differences? If the elements are several words apart, the correct answer will repeat the preposition, and if different phrases demand different prepositions, then both (or all) will be used. In the last example, the predicates are parallel.

Same sort of thing works with other parts of speech.

Now, real Standard Written English is more complicated than the GMAT on this issue, and sentences can actually have different meanings depending on whether you repeat or distribute the  to  (or the preposition, whatever). For instance,  I like to drink and to drive  means something very different than does  I like to drink and drive . The GMAT seems deaf to such distinctions, though.

ksht · Answer

Wrong: She argues that the agency acts with disregard for human life and property and reckless abandon and it should therefore be shut down.

Right according to MGMAT book: 
 a.)She argues THAT the agency acts WITH reckless abandon AND WITH disregard for human life AND property, AND THAT it should therefore be shut down.

But according to me, right statement should be:
 b.) She argues THAT the agency acts WITH reckless abandon AND WITH disregard FOR human life AND FOR property, AND THAT it should therefore be shut down.

Similarly,

Right according to MGMAT book:
 c.) We had an arrangement IN WHICH he cooked AND I cleaned.
But according to me, right statement should be:
 d.) We had an arrangement IN WHICH he cooked AND IN WHICH I cleaned.

Please explain why a.) and c.) are right and don't need to be converted to b.) and d.) respectively as per parallelism
Thanks in advance.
Sorry, new to the platform. Don't know how to ask doubts related to SC without giving options.

Bunuel · Answer

Margin similar topics. Please check the discussion above and ask if anything remains unclear.

Gio96 · Answer

Hi team, I have a similar doubt about the usage of prepositions in parallelism:

I came across in that question that gives me a lot of doubt:

"A comparative study of early European and Asian cookbooks found significant differences among them; European, particularly French, cookbooks assumed no significant prior knowledge of cooking or slaughtering and dressing meat, which Asian cookbooks did."

a-comparative-study-of-early-european-and-asian-cookbooks-389251.html

According to the official explanation, here, if we omit the preposition of before slaughtering the meaning become unclear since "without a repeated preposition, it is very difficult to tell where the Y element begins and especially difficult if the Y element contains two of its own components".

Using the logic of the open-marker, why do we necessarily need to repeat the preposition?

Regards.

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She argues THAT the agency acts WITH reckless abandon AND WITH disrega

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