Though trained in Sweden, the renowned doctor has spent most of her

hey

i also could not find any flaw in choice A thus request some expert to explain the same.

Please review this question once and let me know why is answer choice A wrong

The present participle modifiers in option D ("growing up", "attending" and "doing") describe how she spent most of her life in Africa. Using separate verbs parallel to "spent" cannot express this sense.

The basic crust of the sentence is to say that the doctor spent most of her life in Africa. The rest of the sentence is just used to describe how she spent.
Opn A is gramatically correct, but if you realize the structure of the sentence, you can understand that we need to have modifiers describing how she spent the time but not some parallel verbs.

You are looking at parallelism in this question
A. grew up in Kenya as the eldest of a missionary couple’s six children, attended prep school in Namibia, and after college and medical school in Sweden, did
Eliminate-incorrect parallelism
B. has grown up in Kenya as the eldest of a missionary couple’s six children, has attended prep school in Namibia, and after college and medical school in Sweden, did
eliminate-parallelism is incorrect
C. having grown up in Kenya as the eldest of a missionary couple’s six children, attended prep school in Namibia, and after college and medical school in Sweden, having done
eliminate-parallelism and having makes sentence awkward

D. growing up in Kenya as the eldest of a missionary couple’s six children, attending prep school in Namibia, and, after college and medical school in Sweden, doing
Keep-parallelism is correct! Growing up, attending prep school, doing

E. growing up in Kenya as the eldest of a missionary couple’s six children, attending prep school in Namibia, and, after college and medical school in Sweden, she did
Eliminate-parallelism is not correct

I think its E.
correctly states, how Dr. spent her life:
growing up in kenya...attending prep school...and doing graduate work..

can someone please provide detailed explanation?

In option A "grew up, attended and did" are all in past tense... is parallel for me...

Hello, howdoesitmatter. I saw your query in the main chat about requesting an Expert reply. To do so, click on the "request expert reply" button at the bottom of the original post. As for this SC question, I suspect that people are getting too caught up in has spent without considering the grammatical structure and meaning of the overarching sentence. Regardless of whether the verb tense is the present perfect or the simple past, spent, the modifiers after the main clause are meant to explain how the doctor has spent (or did spend, in my variant) the majority of her life in Africa, and an -ing modifier serves such a purpose while an -ed modifier (watch out: grew is an irregular verb) does not. To keep matters simple, you could not write,

The doctor, grew up in Kenya, has spent most of her life in Africa.

Getting back to the original sentence, in the absence of a more fitting pause (a colon, semicolon, or em dash) and the pronoun she, the sentence structure breaks down, for the same reason as it does above. Consider the following fixes:

Though trained in Sweden, the renowned doctor has spent most of her life in Africa: she grew up in Kenya...
Though trained in Sweden, the renowned doctor has spent most of her life in Africa; she grew up in Kenya...
Though trained in Sweden, the renowned doctor has spent most of her life in Africa—she grew up in Kenya...

I would argue that the second one, with the semicolon, is the weakest, since the punctuation does not necessarily suggest that an explanation of the first clause will follow. Still, it is grammatically functional.

If you can see through the flaw in the original sentence, the rest of the answer choices should be easy to eliminate:


Note the flawed parallelism in has grown up... has attended... and... did. If the first two elements are prefaced by has, then so, too, should be the third: has done graduate work...


Now the list has turned into having grown up... attended... and... having done. Either the second element should have a parallel having or the third should drop it as an understood extension of the original: having grown up... [having] attended... and [having] done...


The parallel modifiers work perfectly here, both grammatically and semantically.


The flawed parallelism returns in a more obvious way: growing up... attending... and... she did. I do not think this one warrants a fuller explanation.

There you have it. Be careful not to blindly follow parallelism, as it can, on occasion, lead you down the wrong path. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

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