By steadfastly facing up to an army as indomitable as the

Question

By steadfastly facing up to an army as indomitable as the German,  and maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered  Britain from definite doom but also changed the course of History

(A) and maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered

(B) and by maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and by lifting the morale of a war-worn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered

(C) maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered

(D) by maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet through the course of the war, and by lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, not only Churchill steered

(E) maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill steered not only

KyleWiddison · Accepted Answer

First of all, I love how absolutely awkward this sentence is, even in the correct sentence. You are left with a bad taste in your mouth with the phrase "as the German", but it's a non-underlined section that you just have to live with, much like having to accept the awkward phrase "as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet".

This really is a parallelism question. The major parallelism issue is with the 3 item list X, Y and Z. You are looking for a format that brings each element forward in a similar manner correctly in that format. A & B break parallelism by unnecessarily adding an "and" before the 2nd element in the list - X,  and  Y, and Z.

B & D might look very parallel because they include "by" before each element in the list, but it's actually not parallel because you would need an adverb (like steadfastly) before the "-ing verbs" (example: By steadfastly facing, by unwaveringly maintaining, and by courageously lifting).

That leaves us with C & E, and you can see the only difference is the placement of "not only". Not only X, but also Y is another structure that needs parallelism. In C you have "not only steered ... but also changed", which is nicely parallel. In E you have "not only Britain...but also changed", which is not parallel at all.

Correct answer is C. Sweet question.

KW

arnabs · Answer

what might be the level of this question according to you??
i think its probably a 680 level.

KyleWiddison · Answer

Yeah, this is probably a high 600 level question.

KW

Posted from my mobile device

pushpitkc · Answer

The main subject in this sentence, Churchill
 1. steered Britain from definite doom 
 2. changed the course of History
Uses  not only X but also Y  which is the right idiomatic expression.

How did he do this? 
1. By steadfastly facing up to an army as indomitable as the German
2. By cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war
3. By lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches.

Option C corrects the grammatical error in the original sentence.
 Whenever presenting a list, we use X,Y and Z , whereas 
the original sentence uses   X, and Y, and Z, which is incorrect construction.

arvind910619 · Answer

Imo C
And is used to list items x,y,and Z 
not only X but also should be parallel .

shashankism · Answer

This question is basically testing the concept of parallelism. The original structure is of the form ...., and...., and which is not correct. 
So, Reject A and B

We don't require "by" 3 times in the sentence, so reject D

Now in the option C & E, the only difference is (a)Churchill not only steered .... / (b) Churchill steered not only.. 
(a) means Churchill Steered Britain and Churchill changed the history , (b) means Churchill steered Britain and Churchill steered changed the history..
SO, you can easily identify that (a) is correct out of (a) and (b)

Hence C is correct answer

Skywalker18 · Answer

Though I got this question correct, I have a query. In the above post by KyleWiddison, he has mentioned that -
"B & D might look very parallel because they include "by" before each element in the list,  but it's actually not parallel because you would need an adverb (like steadfastly) before the "-ing verbs" (example: By steadfastly facing, by unwaveringly maintaining, and by courageously lifting). "

1. I agree that in option B, the use of and before the second element(by maintaining...) is incorrect and in option D, there is parallelism issue in Not only X, but also Y.  But, do we need an adverb before the ing-verbs in the parallel elements? 
Because if this logic(bolded) were to be true, then shouldn't option C too be incorrect?

2. Which of the following will be preferred?

(C) maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered 
(D-new) by maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet through the course of the war, and by lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered

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AjiteshArun · Answer

I don't think that we  need  an adverb there. There is some (a lot of) creativity that can go into parallelism, and we don't have to approach the issue as if it were a checklist.

This is how I read option C:

By  steadfastly  facing   up to an army as indomitable as the German,   maintaining   cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and   lifting   the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered Britain from definite doom but also changed the course of History.

That is, the three items are: (a) by steadfastly facing, (b) by maintaining, and (c) by raising.

I don't think that the sentence is intended to be read as:

By  steadfastly  facing  ,  steadfastly  maintaining  , and  steadfastly  lifting  ...

The reasons you mentioned are the ones I'd go with to remove options B and D.

dcummins · Answer

By steadfastly facing up to an army as indomitable as the German,   and  maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered  Britain from definite doom but also changed the course of History

First and foremost, I looked for the obvious mistake vertically.
(D) by maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet through the course of the war, and by lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, not only  Churchill steered

Should be "not only  did  Churchill steer" to attach to the previous things Churchill did.

A is incorrect because the structure is really just exhaustive. "By FACING UP, AND X, AND Y, CHURCHILL Z" It should be "By FACING UP, X, and Y, Churchill" to logically communicate that three things were accomplished in relation to the action - CHURCHILL did X, Y and Z, to steer Britain from Doom, but he didn't do "X, AND y, AND z". the "AND" treats Y and Z almost as separate lists or non-related items.

(B)  and  by maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war,  and  by lifting the morale of a war-worn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered

B is incorrect for similar reasons.

(C) maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered

(E) maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches,  Churchill steered not only

The only difference between C and E is the  Churchill ...

E is incorrect because the "steered" logically applies to "changed the course of history" and this doesn't make sense.

We should say that With X,Y, and Z, Churchill did two things: Steered and Changed.

Hoozan · Answer

By steadfastly facing up to an army as indomitable as the German,  and maintaining cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war, and lifting the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches, Churchill not only steered  Britain from definite doom but also changed the course of History

Meaning Analysis   Churchill steered Britain from doom. He also changed the course of History.  (The rest are modifiers modifying the noun "Churchill")

There are three parallel entities "facing" "maintaining" and "lifting" and hence we must used "and" just before the third entity (lifting) But here, "and" has been repeated twice thus making the sentence structure inferior.

In short: X, Y, and Z  correct  ; X, and Y, and Z  incorrect

Parallelism error: 
a) "by" can be repeated for all three or can be taken as the common entity
b) "and" must be used just before the last entity in the list.

To sum it up: 
(1) by X, Y, and Z -  correct 
(2) by X, by Y, and by Z -  correct 
(3) by X, and by Y, and by Z -  incorrect 
(4) by X, Y, and by Z -  incorrect

Correct. All errors are rectified

The parallelism error has been rectified (check option B). However, there is a new parallelism error made. "Not only X but also Y" is a construction in which X and Y must be parallel. When we read the complete sentence we get "not only  Churchill  steered.. but also  changed  the course of History" we have a noun after "not only" and a verb after "but also". This is a clear parallelism error.

Learning:-  we can have all verbs parallel to verbs, all nouns parallel to noun BUT   we cannot have    Nouns parallel to Verbs.

(E)  maintaining  cordial relations with as differing regimes as the US and the Soviet throughout the course of the war,  and lifting  the morale of a war-torn country through his inspirational speeches,  Churchill steered not only

Same error as (D)

Correct choice:   (C)

pk6969 · Answer

In C, won't it mean By steadfastly facing, (by steadfastly) mantaining and (by steadfastly) lifting, because if all the following entities are parallel, then adverb would modify all three.
Please help.

svasan05 · Answer

Hi  pk6969

You're right - if we do apply the same adverb to all three verbs then it would be structured in that way. However, even if we do accept "steadfastly maintaining", "steadfastly lifting" does not make much sense, does it?

Therefore, the only logical way to structure the verb is to have "steadfastly facing", "maintaining" and "lifting" as the three verbs. I agree that this is not perfectly parallel, but it is somewhat parallel as far as the verbs are concerned (with one of them having an adverb).

Always remember that our job is to select  the best possible  answer option, which may not always be perfect. Given that all other answer options have much more obvious errors, we have to live with option (C) for this question.

Hope this helps.

pk6969 · Answer

Hi  svasan05  
Thanks for clarifying it. I have one more doubt. If in D, it was "Churchill not only steered" rather than "not only Churchill steered", then would D be the best choice??

svasan05 · Answer

Hi

That would make option (D) much cleaner than it is now.

It would still be a tight call between (C) and (D), since (C) is also grammatically correct, and one can definitely argue that it is possible to "steadfastly" (which means "without changing" or "firmly") "lift". The only reason I can state for not using this adverb with this verb is that I don't like the construction! (which should be the absolute last reason to reject an answer option - in my defense, I have never seen "steadfast" used with "lift")

To come back to the point, if option (D) were as you put it, then you would not have option (C) in the current form, as they are both almost equally strong options, though neither sentence is perfect. And if GMAT still decided to throw the two options in these forms together, I would go with the changed option (D) as you have put it, though I cannot give an objective reason for rejecting option (C).

I hope that (at least, somewhat) helps.

ramlala · Answer

Here is split
1. , Churchill not only steered.......but also changed...... Eliminate D & E  
2. Parallelim in all 3 modifiers.
 By steadfastly facing .....,   By  maintaining ....., and   By  lifting .  Eliminate A & B

VerbalBot · Answer

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By steadfastly facing up to an army as indomitable as the

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