Tropical bats play important roles in the rain forest ecosystem

Question

Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem, aiding in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds; pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help the producing of tequila by pollinating agave plants.

A) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help the producing of
B) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly helping to produce
C) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and they indirectly help to produce
D) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help producing
E) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; indirectly helping the producing of

Similar question can be found in OG 2013 - OG 2018
https://gmatclub.com/forum/tropical-bat ... 31457.html

VeritasPrepErika · Accepted Answer

This question is testing a weird case of semicolon usage. When we are listing things that have commas in them, we can separate the list items with semicolons instead for clarity.

For example, if I'm trying to list city names, "Paris, France, Berlin, Germany, and Brussels, Belgium" is pretty confusing — is this a list of 6 different places? If we instead separate the city names with semicolons ("Paris, France; Berlin, Germany; and Brussels, Belgium"), our list becomes a lot more clear.

So our list in B is

aiding  in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds;  pollinating  banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly  helping  to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

D is not parallel if we consider it a list.

Even if we were following the "semicolons separate independent clauses" rule, D still wouldn't work — the first two pieces of the sentences are independent clauses, but the third is not.

Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem, aiding in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds ;  they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees ;  and indirectly help producing tequila by pollinating agave plants .

anothermillenial · Answer

Tropical bats play important roles in the rain forest ecosystem, aiding in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds;  pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help the producing of  tequila by pollinating agave plants.

We're looking for parallelism across the three elements. We're given the hint from the non-underlined section (aiding in the dispersal of X,Y,Z)... so we're looking for an -ing verb. This reasoning rules out (D) and (E). (E) also has two other issues: 1) doesn't have an "and" between the pollination and producing element and 2) does not use the action noun form of "producing."

We're left with (A) and (C). (A) is incorrect because not parallel & "help the producing of" is not optimal....when an action noun ("production of") exists. (C) doesn't following the -ing parallelism.

A) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly  help the producing of 
B)  pollinating  banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly  helping  to produce
C) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and they indirectly  help to produce  
D) they  pollinate  banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help producing
E) they  pollinate  banana, breadfruit, and mango trees ;  indirectly helping  the producing of

saurabh9gupta · Answer

My response.

The question is testing the concept of parallelism.

a) wrong because -ing form is a different structure "complex gerund" whereas other -ing forms are indicating results of a clause.
b) Correct
c) wrong because -ing form is missing after and
d) "they" disrupts parallelism
e) same as d)

daspri2809 · Answer

We have three things in the list separated by ;
 aiding  in the dispersal of A,B,C;  pollinating  E,F,G; and indirectly  helping  H.

mzaid · Answer

I chose option D as I thought after semicolon an independent clause be there unless the semicolon is not included in the underlined part, Could someone pleas explain what I'am missing here.

AjiteshArun · Answer

The semicolon is just a "big comma" here.

Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem,  aiding  in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds ,   pollinating  banana, breadfruit, and mango trees ,  and indirectly  helping  to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem,  aiding  in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds ;   pollinating  banana, breadfruit, and mango trees ;  and indirectly  helping  to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

rishabhmishra · Answer

Always check citation for accuracy before use.
I think i can help you with this question pretty easily, by using the independent clause rules:-
in our options, every option is using semicolon ,so both sentence after semicolon must be independent clause so C,D and E are incorrect as they are using "they" which is dependent clause, relying over 1st part of sentence.
Now A and B left to produce / producing of 
we use to produce because its purpose is to produce. So B is correct.
Hope i was able to help you.

MSIMBA · Answer

A , C , D : PRALLELISM NOT MANTAIN
 - AIDING,POLLINATING AND HELPING SHOULD BE THERE

E : HELPING THE RPODUCING NOT CORRECT WORD

B : CORRECT MEANING

RAHUL_GMAT · Answer

I havent seen any GMAT question like this before - Where Semicolon is used in place of Comma, Can some one provide me with some more example for the same?

mba757 · Answer

(A) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help the producing of
 (1) breaks parallelism: “aiding in the dispersal…; pollinating banana…; pollinating banana…; indirectly help”; (2) terrible rhetoric: “the producing of…” should be “to produce”

(B) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly helping to produce
 Best option

(C) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and they indirectly help to produce
 (1) breaks parallelism: “aiding in the dispersal…; pollinating banana…; pollinating banana…; and they indirectly help”;

(D) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help producing
 (1) breaks parallelism: “aiding in the dispersal…; pollinating banana…; they pollinate…; and indirectly help…”

(E) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; indirectly helping the producing of
 (1) breaks parallelism: “aiding in the dispersal…; pollinating banana…; they pollinate…; indirectly helping”; (2) should have “and” after a list of three or more; (3) terrible rhetoric: “the producing of…” should be “to produce”

vikramgade · Answer

VeritasPrepErika 
Ma'am, can you please help me here.
I am confused with the credited response/option B(with respect to the meaning it would imply), because it says ' and indirectly helping to produce tequila'. Thus (helping) participial form modifies the whole clause 'Tropical bats play an important role in the RFE'.
How can production of tequila relate to playing imp. role in the RFE.
Grammar wise it is perfect but the intended meaning of option B consfuses me. Please help me.

Thanks!
Vikram

Posted from my mobile device

AjiteshArun · Answer

Hi  RAHUL_GMAT ,

Take a look at  this post . Here is  a direct link to that question .

vikramgade · Answer

Any tutor or expert kindly help me with my question.
Thanks a ton!
Vikram

unraveled · Answer

I'm not a tutor but let me help you.

First of all, you are not right about the first highlighted part - at least partially. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by second highlighted text. Anyway.

B looks like this 
Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem, aiding in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds;  pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly helping to produce  tequila by pollinating agave plants.

Here Subject is 'Tropical bats' and Main verb is 'play' in the part of the sentence 'Tropical ... ecosystem'. 
Further 'aiding... seeds' - participle modifier - modifies the main verb, giving additional information. 
Similarly, 'pollinating ... trees' and 'helping ... plants' modify the main verb.

So, you can understand the sentence as 
Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem, aiding in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds.
Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem, pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees.
Tropical bats play an important role in the rain forest ecosystem, indirectly helping to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

Thus, the three modifiers are combined in a single sentence using a list. For clarity, semicolons are used to separate the three big modifier phrases.
The last modifier indirectly helps RFE. So, meaning-wise it is fine.

Hope this helps.

vikramgade · Answer

Dear unraveled,
First of all, I consider you an expert.
Second, thank you for your time and your patience in typing all the fragments separately.
Third, my only query is how 'indirectly helping to produce tequila, an alcohol, is connected to (play a role in) rain forest ecosystem. Meaning wise it does not ring a bell to me. Although grammar wise it is perfect.

Here I am assuming that a present participle preceded by a comma(or a semicolon in this case, which is acting as a substitute for a comma) plays the role of an adverbial modifier(or connects or refers to the main clause rather than to the preceeding noun).

Regards,
Vikram Gade

unraveled · Answer

Thank you if you do, I'm glad

For addressing your third query: Bats do help in a similar way bees(while they are on lookout for food) help pollinate flowers. If you are still looking to understand how things work, then start reading journals(Sciencedirect, Researchgate, Scientific American etc.) - specifically for science articles. Here's one link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9419302422

Manoj1998 · Answer

GMATNinja , @E-GMAT
I got the answer correct but I was stuck at B, as in option B, isn't "helping to produce" unidiomatic and shouldn't it be "helping in producing".

ExpertsGlobal5 · Answer

Hello  Manoj1998 ,

We hope this finds you well.

Having gone through the question and your query, we believe that we can help resolve your doubt.

In this sentence, neither of the phrases mentioned is incorrect, but "helping to produce" is actually the preferred construction, since it uses the infinitive verb form ("to + the base form of verb" - "to + produce" in this sentence) to refer to the reason behind the action "helping". In referring to the purpose or intent of any action, the infinitive verb form is preferred over construction that uses the present participle form ("verb+ing" - "producing" in this context); in fact, the infinitive verb form is the preferred construction for referring to the purpose or intent of an action. To reiterate, using constructions other than the infinitive verb form to refer to the purpose or intent of an action is not incorrect, but the infinitive verb form is preferred in this context.

To understand the concept of "Infinitive" versus "Present Participle" on GMAT, you may want to watch the following video (~2 minutes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKizVOYx0_k

All the best!
Experts' Global Team

VerbalBot · Answer

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Tropical bats play important roles in the rain forest ecosystem

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Tropical bats play important roles in the rain forest ecosystem

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