Tropical bats play important roles in the rain forest ecosystem, aidin

Question

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 produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

(a) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help produce

(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

OG2018 SC#692

Very Similar Question is Posted in the
Verbal OG 2019 SC05244 and Verbal OG 2020 that has different answer choices
https://gmatclub.com/forum/tropical-bat ... 96210.html

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Outdoor California - Volumes 58-60 - Page 14

https://books.google.com.my/books?id=EyoeWHOH3GcC
1997 - ‎Snippet view - ‎More editions
But unlike most Small mammals, bats are long-lived (up to 30 years or more for some species), and most species produce only one young per year. Scientists ... Bats do not benefit tequila drinkers alone. Important agricultural and commercial plants like bananas, balsawood, breadfruit, chicle (for chewing gum), cashews, dates, figs, mangoes, and vanilla also rely on bats for pollination and seed dispersal.

I chose (d).
I thought when semicolon is used, an independent clause should be followed after. Thus, (a), (b), (c) were excluded from the list per my thought.

I guess a semicolon can be used to list certain items to make a sentence parallel. Am I right?

ByeByeGMAT · Answer

Hello, I do not quite understand E from OG explanation. It said, "although this version maintains parallelism throughout, the phase..". My question is why OG said E has followed the parallelism structure?

shaonkarim · Answer

If in option E they pollinate would pollinating, then will option E be correct?

Posted from my mobile device

AjiteshArun · Answer

Even if we go with  pollinating  instead of  they pollinate , option E doesn't have an  and .

... aiding... ; pollinating... ;  and  helping...

Also,  indirectly  helping the producing   is not idiomatic.

Harsh2111s · Answer

How option A is not parallel ?
aiding -- verb
pollinating -- verb
help -- verb

VeritasKarishma   GMATNinja ,
Is there any other issue in this sentence ?

AjiteshArun · Answer

Harsh2111s :  aiding  and  pollinating  are not verbs. In fact, no  -ing  is ever a complete verb.

sparshgs97 · Answer

I am taught that we cannot have a fanboy after a semi colon. Then how is option B right and E wrong. Either i am taught something wrong or i should just settle for a less score in verbal.

EducationAisle · Answer

Hi  sparshgs97 , one application of  semi-colon  obviously is that it is used to connect two  Independent  clauses.

Consider this as  another  application of semi-colon: to connect various elements in a list, when each element has further  sub-elements .

The correct option here is:

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 helping to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants .

Because of the use of semi-colons, there is a clear  demarcation  of various elements and sub-elements ( within  each element):

i) Element-1: aiding in the dispersal of cashew (sub-element-11), date (sub-element-12), and fig seeds (sub-element-13) 
ii) Element-2: pollinating banana (sub-element-21), breadfruit (sub-element-22), and mango trees (sub-element-23)
iii) Element-3: indirectly helping to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

Now, in this correct option, let us see what happens if the sentence had used  commas  instead of  semi-colons :

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 helping to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants .

Notice how  confusing  the above sentence is, because all we see is an almost  infinite  series of  commas , making it extremely difficult for us to make sense of how each element and sub-element is  demarcated . The use of semi-colons neatly solves this interpretation conundrum.

Another similar official question that comes to my mind:

First discovered more than 30 years ago, Lina's sunbird, a four-and-a-half-inch animal found in the Philippines and resembling a hummingbird, has shimmering metallic colors on its head; a brilliant orange patch, bordered with red tufts, in the center of its breast; and a red eye .

Again, notice a  similar  use of semi-colons in the above sentence.

KarishmaB · Answer

To act as a verb, the -ing form of the verb must use an auxiliary too.
e.g. am going, is eating etc.

Here the present participle form (ing form) does not act as a verb. Only 'help' acts as a verb. The present participle forms present the list of roles: aiding, pollinating and helping. They tell you how they play the important roles. 
Hence option (B) is correct.

Jenniferxu1107 · Answer

A minor use of semicolon is to separate items that themselves contain commas. 
--Quoted from MANHATTAN GMAT Sentence Correction.

In this case, "banana, breadfruit, and mango trees" and "aiding in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds" both have their own commas.

Hope my answer can clear your confusion.

peanuts · 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 produce  tequila by pollinating agave plants.

Meaning: tropical bats aid in the dispersal of seeds, pollinate banana, and indirectly help produce tequila. The list is very long with tons of commas, so to make the parallel structure clear, semicolon was used

(a) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help produce  "pollinating" is not parallel with "help"

(b) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly helping to produce  Good enough. Semicolon was used to separate parallel items in a list

(c) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and they indirectly help to produce  aiding, pollinating and they help are not parallel. Also, they could refer to a lot of things, so it is ambiguous

(d) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help producing  they could refer to fig seeds --> make no sense

(e) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees: indirectly helping the producing of  to separate items in a list with semicolon and colon at the same time is wrong

lakshya14 · Answer

In (B), the sentence after fisrt semi colon, it stats with an ing modifier, and never had a subject and closes with a semicolon. How come that's a valid sentence?

EducationAisle · Answer

Hi  lakshya14 ,  this post  will help you.

TheUltimateWinner · Answer

Request Expert Reply:   
 GMATNinja 
I know why the semi-colon has been used here, but I have a query on it.
What if we have just 1 item in the middle part like the following? Should I use COMMA or SEMI-COLON before the final AND?
 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 helping to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

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

or,

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

One more query:
Did we use the ' aiding  in the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds' as adverbial modifier?

MHIKER · Answer

The sentence describes the roles of tropical in the ecosystem with present particle parallelism and the semicolon is working here as a comma. So the correct answer is B.

Vinodhini1803 · Answer

GMATNinja ,

I understand why B is right. However, in B idiom helping to is not right. The idiom is 'help in or helping in'. Although none of the choice has that, if there was another sentence same as B and the idiom was help in, which should be chosen?

GMATNinja · Answer

There's an easy solution here, one that guarantees that a misconception about a certain idiom will never lead you astray. Ready? Don't use idioms as decision points unless you absolutely have to .

In this case, you could easily come up with multiple valid constructions in which "help" was paired with different prepositions. 1) Tim offered help to his wife. 2) Tim needs help in the kitchen. 3) Tim helped on Thursday. 4) Tim wants help with his kids. 5) We needed Tim's help for the Christmas party. Every option above is valid. You probably already knew this -- not because you'd memorized every possible sentence that might involve the word "help," but because the constructions were clear and logical to you. Put another way, thinking about a sentence is a better guide than trying to recall whether there's some obscure rule forbidding a certain sequence of words. Language is complicated. Because it would be essentially impossible to internalize every possible allowable idiom you might see, you want to either rely on other issues, or use logic to determine which construction works best in a given context. I hope that helps!

GMATNinja · Answer

It might be helpful to consider a simple example in which semicolons are used to separate elements in a list:

In a delicious effort to find the best jollof rice on the East Coast, Charlie visited Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ;  New York, New York ;  and Baltimore, Maryland.

You can see why the semicolons are helpful here. Without them, it's difficult to tell when one city ends and the next begins, so it makes sense to be consistent and use one after both Philadelphia and New York, giving us a construction of "X; Y; and Z."

Same deal in your example. You'd want to use SEMICOLON + AND after "pollinating bananas" so that the reader can tell that this element is complete and we're moving on to the final component of the list. Otherwise, it's confusing -- you wouldn't want to use a comma to separate one element from another when all the other elements of the list all contain commas  within  them.

Takeaway: This is a pretty esoteric use of semicolons, and not something that appears very often on the GMAT. While you might encounter an SC problem that tests your understanding of semicolon usage, there's a very low probability that a question would come down to this kind of decision point alone. That said, there's value in seeing how the rule is shaped by logic and clarity.

Put another way, even if you don't know a given rule, you can often reason your way into it. I guess it's a good reminder that SC is less about what you know than about how to think logically under pressure.

For more on punctuation on the GMAT -- and why very little of it is worth worrying about -- check out  this video .

Exactly right -- anytime you see FULL CLAUSE + COMMA + -ING, the -ING generally operates as an adverb, modifying the entire previous clause.

I hope that helps a bit!

CEdward · Answer

All about parallelism...there's a list going on here so we need the elements of the list to be parallel:

1.  aiding  in the dispersal...
2.  pollinating  banana...
3.  helping  to produce...

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 produce tequila by pollinating agave plants.

(a) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help produce X

(b) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly helping to produce  CORRECT

(c) pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and they indirectly help to produce X

(d) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees; and indirectly help producing X

(e) they pollinate banana, breadfruit, and mango trees: indirectly helping the producing of X

woohoo921 · Answer

egmat 
Thank you for your helpful reply. To clarify, I realize that semi-colons are used to separate elements in a list, but could you have used commas in place of the semi-colons?

In other words, would what I have below be considered correct?
“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."

Thank you!

egmat · Answer

Hey  woohoo921

Thank you for your query.

The answer to your question is: No, we cannot use commas instead of semi-colons in this sentence.

Here's why:

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 .

In certain academic circles, this is called the use of the semi-colon as a "SUPER COMMA". According to this rule, a semi-colon is used to separate entities in a list if some or all of the entities already have one or more commas within them. In such situations, using a semi-colon to separate the entities of the super-list avoids confusion or mistaking a sub-list entity for a super-list entity.

For example:

The box contains  a, b, and c ;  d and e ;  f, g, h, and i ;  and   j and k .

The above sentence contains a list of four super entities: A, B, C, and D, where:
 A = a, b, and c
B = d and e
C = f, g, h, and i
D = j and k

Notice how the use of the semi-colon also makes it easier to understand the roles of two different ranks of the word "and". The ' and ' highlighted in the sentence joins the last entity of the super list "D". Whereas all the other 'ands' join members of the sub-list.

This is why, we must use a semi-colon in the given official question. There are three entities in the super list, and the first two contain commas. Hence, it's required to separate these super entities with semi-colons.

A = the dispersal of cashew, date, and fig seeds
B = pollinating banana, breadfruit, and mango trees
C = indirectly helping to produce tequila by pollinating agave plants

I hope this helps improve your understanding.

Happy Learning!

Abhishek

Tropical bats play important roles in the rain forest ecosystem, aidin

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GMAT Sentence Correction (SC - EA only) Questions

Tropical bats play important roles in the rain forest ecosystem, aidin

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