V11-15

Official Solution:

A Dartmouth-led research team has discovered that unlike the males of most species of crickets, a certain group of male crickets call female crickets to them by the use of high frequency sounds, but not low frequency ones, and they use high frequency sounds similar to that of a predator such as a bat.

A. a certain group of male crickets call female crickets to them by the use of high frequency sounds, but not low frequency ones, and they use high
B. a certain group of male crickets call female crickets to them by the use of high frequency sounds, rather than using low frequency ones, and use high
C. the males of a certain group of crickets call female crickets to them using high frequency sounds, rather than low frequency ones, high
D. the males of a certain group of crickets call female crickets to them by using high frequency sounds, but not low frequency ones, they use high
E. the males of a certain group of crickets call female crickets to them using high frequency sounds, rather than low frequency ones, and using high


A. males of most species of crickets is wrongly compared with certain groups of male crickets.

males is not parallel to groups.

by the use of is unnecessarily wordy.

The use of but not does not clearly convey that most other male crickets use low frequency sounds.

Insertion of they is not required.

B. males of most species of crickets is wrongly compared with certain groups of male crickets. males is not parallel to groups.

Violates parallelism with by the use of... instead of using .

C. CORRECT. Eliminates the above errors. Introduces an absolute phrase correctly to describe high frequency sounds further. The last part of the sentence is an absolute phrase modifier. An absolute phrase modifier modifies (provides some more information about) the entire main clause in some way. The structure of an absolute phrase is as follows:.

Here:

D. The use of but not does not clearly convey that most other male crickets use low frequency sounds. “They use high frequency….” is a run-on sentence: two clauses are joined by a comma (without a conjunction):.

E. Using high frequency sounds…as a bat is a sentence fragment. The modifier "using high frequency sounds similar to that of a predator such as a bat" does not have an antecedent or a clause to refer to.


Answer: C