V34-04

Official Solution:


To supplement a vegetarian diet that contains surprisingly few nutrients, African elephants often dig up earth to obtain salt and minerals and churn the ground with gigantic tusks, dislodging large pieces of soil into its mouth.


A. African elephants often dig up earth to obtain salt and minerals and churn the ground with gigantic tusks, dislodging
B. African elephants often dig up earth to obtain salt and minerals, and they churn the ground with gigantic tusks and dislodge
C. African elephants often obtain salt and minerals by digging up earth, churn the ground with their gigantic tusks, and dislodge
D. the African elephant often obtains salt and minerals by digging up earth, churning the ground with gigantic tusks and dislodging
E. the African elephant often obtains salt and minerals by digging up earth, churns the ground with gigantic tusks, and it dislodges


I once met an elephant that was so emotionally attached to her human friend that she would slam her head into trees when that human went home to his own family at night, just because she was sad to see him go. I am not making this up. Elephants are really interesting critters.





This one sounds great! The parallelism is reasonable enough: “...elephants often dig up earth to obtain salt and minerals and churn the ground with gigantic tusks…” That works. And then the phrase beginning with “dislodging” modifies the previous clause, and tells us more about the consequences of the elephants’ habit of digging and churning the ground. Reasonable enough.

But hopefully you’re looking at the non-underlined portion of the sentence. That “its” at the very end of the sentence should jump off the page at you. If we’re saying “its mouth”, then there must only be one elephant, right? Trouble is, “African elephants” is plural.

That’s spectacularly wrong. (A) is out.





The fast error: “African elephants” is still wrong, since the end of the sentence says “its mouth.”

For whatever it’s worth, the parallelism is also not exactly ideal here. Why would we start a brand-new clause with the phrase “they churn… and dislodge…”? That’s not WRONG, exactly, but there’s no good reason to do that, when all three verbs are actions performed by the same subject (the elephants). Why bother repeating the subject for no good reason?

But even if you’re not convinced that inserting “they” is a problem here, the pronoun definitely is. (B) is gone.





All three verbs (obtain, churn, dislodge) are parallel here, and that’s cute.

Trouble is, we have the same pronoun problem as in (A) and (B): “African elephants… their tusks… its mouth.” That’s not cute. Eliminate (C).





Well, now “the African elephant” is singular, and that’s great, since it now matches the pronoun “its.”

In case you’re wondering: sometimes, it’s OK to use the singular form of an animal to talk about the species as a whole. That’s exactly what you’ll hear on most wildlife documentaries. It sounds funny to my American ears, but you’ll see that same usage in quite a few GMAT questions.

What about the parallelism? “...the African elephant often obtains salt and minerals by digging up earth, churning the ground with gigantic tusks and dislodging... ” That’s OK, I guess. In this construction, “churning” and “dislodging” are two modifiers (participles, if you like the jargon) that give us extra information about what happens when the elephant “obtains salt and minerals.”

It might not be the way I would choose to write the sentence in real life, but I can definitely live with it on the GMAT. Let’s keep (D).





“Elephant” is singular again here, and that’s good. But the parallelism isn’t good: “the African elephant often obtains salt and minerals by digging up earth, churns the ground with gigantic tusks, and it dislodges...”

That’s a classic parallelism error: we have “the elephant (verb), (verb), and (pronoun verb). That’s not OK.

(E) is out, and (D) is the correct answer.


Answer: D