Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people

Question

Project SC Butler: Day 84 Sentence Correction (SC1) 
 For SC butler Questions  Click Here

Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and overestimate potential health benefits, while fear affects this in the opposite way .

A) Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and overestimate potential health benefits, while fear affects this in the opposite way

B) It has been determined by behavioral economists that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and potentially overestimate the benefits, while fear is affecting them in the opposite way

C) Behavioral economists have determined anger to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplaying risks and potentially overestimating benefits; fear affects them in the opposite way

D) Behavioral economists have determined that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplaying risks and potentially overestimating benefits, and that fear has the opposite effect

E) Behavioral economists have determined that anger, which makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and potentially overestimate the benefits, has the opposite effect of fear

The  best or excellent answers get kudos , which will be  awarded  after   the answer is revealed.
More than one award of kudos is possible.

T his question may or may not contain an accurate representation of a question from Princeton Review's Verbal Workout, 4th edition.
The question is retired.

aanjumz92 · Answer

IMO correct answer is E.

A is wrong. It's correct in its format of clearly explaining that anger makes people 1. assess situations optimistically, 2. downplay risks, 3. and overestimate health benefits. The list is correct in its format of x,y, and z. But what is the "this" referring to?

B is wrong, what is "it"? Who or what is "them" referring to? Too ambiguous so be right.

C is wrong. "Determined anger to make" is poorly constructed and beyond that, grammatically it's wrong too. Parallelism is lacking in "assess .... downplaying....overestimating..."

D is wrong. Again same as C. No parallelism in the list.

E is correct. Correct parallelism with the list format, and the ambiguous "this" in option A is removed.

EDIT

Haha made a classic mistake in disregarding the meaning. It is indeed answer choice D that is correct! Blindly following parallel markers is a no go for the gmat! ALWAYS THINK!

GKomoku · Answer

Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and overestimate potential health benefits, while fear affects this in the opposite way . Meaning and Error analysis: From current state of the original sentence it's quite difficult to get exactly intended meaning of the sentence. Seems anger makes people do 3 things: 1. assess situations more optimistically 2. downplay risks 3. overestimate potential health benefits But this 3 entities of the list is not perfect in terms of meaning, even if all of them //. Second part of the sentence with "while" is not clear, "this" what? situation? behaviour? not clear. I don't like passive construction of the sentence but this is not the point to directly eliminate this answer. Meaning is unclear, but let's keep it and see what we've got. A) Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and overestimate potential health benefits, while fear affects this in the opposite way B) It has been determined by behavioral economists that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and potentially overestimate the benefits, while fear is affecting them in the opposite way ("it" seems placeholder, list still //, but not clear again, we don't have any "this", but "is affecting" is wrong, everything should be in present simple, becouse the author presents general facts about anger and fear) C) Behavioral economists have determined anger to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplaying risks and potentially overestimating benefits; fear affects them in the opposite way (active constraction is good, now we list with 2 v-ing modifing preceeding clause, not bad, we have IC ; IC, but to me better to have IC , DC becouse the author presents 2 idea connected to each other, pronoun "them" - refers to? economists? people? - umbiguity, in sum this answer choice is not a catastrohpic disaster, but seems better than (A), let's keep them both and go futher) E) Behavioral economists have determined that anger, which makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and potentially overestimate the benefits, has the opposite effect of fear (again we back for 3 entity list, but "has" where is the subject for it? economists? it's plural not agree in number, even if "economists is the subject for "has" it has to be connected with firs verb "have" with proper marker "and", out) D) Behavioral economists have determined that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplaying risks and potentially overestimating benefits, and that fear has the opposite effect D.JPG Beautiful constraction, meaning is pretty clear. Behavioral economists have determined 2 things: 1. that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically 2. that fear has the opposite effect And how anger makes people assess situations more optimistically? 1. downplaying risks 2. potentially overestimating benefits We have 2 //ims "and" marker, with 2 // constraction. (A) and (C) is 100% out in comparison with (D) D is the answer

generis · Answer

Project SC Butler: Day 84 Sentence Correction (SC1) 
 For SC butler Questions  Click Here

Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and overestimate potential health benefits, while fear affects this in the opposite way .

A) Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and overestimate potential health benefits, while fear affects this in the opposite way
B) It has been determined by behavioral economists that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and potentially overestimate the benefits, while fear is affecting them in the opposite way
C) Behavioral economists have determined anger to make people assess situations more optimistically, downplaying risks and potentially overestimating benefits; fear affects them in the opposite way
D) Behavioral economists have determined that anger makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplaying risks and potentially overestimating benefits, and that fear has the opposite effect
E) Behavioral economists have determined that anger, which makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and potentially overestimate the benefits, has the opposite effect of fear

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION and COMMENTS   
 aanjumz92  , welcome!

The OE  with my annotations in blue typeface

Typically I separate the OE and my comments. That strategy would not be wise in this instance.

• The sentence needs correcting because it uses an ambiguous pronoun,  this .
 GMAC does not like the word  this  by itself. 
 This  is a determiner, also known as a demonstrative.

The word points to something. The word  demonstrates   which thing, which one. 
Pick fruit from  this strawberry plant , not that strawberry plant.
I like  this car  with four doors better than that car with two doors.

The pronoun is not really ambiguous. It's nonsensical. 
 This  cannot stand for a whole clause, in the same way that  comma + which  cannot stand for a whole clause.
On the GMAT, in this context,  this   must be followed immediately by a noun. 
 
This what? 
This assessment of situations?
If "this assessment of situations" is the case, the sentence needs to say 
. . .  while fear affects this process of assessment in the opposite way.

•  In option B,  It  is a placeholder. The prepositional phrase "by behavioral economists" correctly renders the idiomatic expression  determine . . . that .

• Choices B and C repeat this error  , but the bad pronoun here is them,
which could refer to any one of the several plural nouns in this sentence.
 Let pronoun ambiguity be one of your last reasons to eliminate a choice. Eliminate B and C because  this  stands alone.

• Choice C also misuses the idiom  determine . . . that

Prep sources often identify the idiomatic phrase  determined by  
Correct:  The election was determined by insidious actions performed by agents of a hostile state. 
That idiomatic expression uses the simple past tense of to determine.
The past participle can also be used in the construction  determined by 
Correct:  The outcome, determined by many factors, was not good.

If the verb determine is used in the sense of  to establish  or  to discover , then  determine  often acts just as
those verbs do:  determine  takes a  that . 
In fact, think of ". . . economists have discovered/determined THAT . . ."
We do not always need  that .

The problem with option C is that  have determined anger to make  suggests that the economists
possess "determined anger"   . . .
that economists possess a determined anger that drives  them  to want to make people assess . . .

The best way to handle "determine"? Dictionaries. Oxford (pick U.S./American), Cambridge (same), Merriam-Webster.
Don't worry about the issue much.

• Choice E scrambles the meaning of the sentence, making it seem  as if the point of the sentence is that fear and anger are opposites.

The point of the sentence is that anger makes people too optimistic about risks and rewards, and fear makes people too pessimistic about risks and rewards.

Choice E? Remove the comma + which. The whole thing is a non-essential modifier: which makes people assess situations more optimistically, downplay risks, and potentially overestimate the benefits,

Now: . . . Behavioral economists have determined that anger . . . has the opposite effect of fear.
-- That's nice. What effect does fear have, and on what?
-- The non-essential modifier is gone. 
-- Anger may cause the three things listed to happen, but are we talking about "fear" in the same context as anger?

-- The emphasis shifted from the way that anger and fear affect risk assessment in particular to the way that anger and fear generally have opposite effects.

• Option E also changes the meaning in subtler ways by turning the phrase "overestimating potential benefits" into "potentially overestimate the benefits."
 Those two phrases do not mean the same thing.

Choice E is parallel.   
anger makes people  assess  situations more optimistically,  downplay  risks, and potentially  overestimate  the benefits
-- in this case, "potentially" cannot go after "overestimate," and all three items in the list are present tense verbs

Finally, . . . . 
Compare answers to each other if you cannot eliminate on the basis of grammar alone.
On harder questions, that situation will often be the case.

GKomoku  wrote  (A) and (C) is 100% out in comparison with (D) . 
That move is strategic. We may not know how to get rid of an answer.
But if we cannot find the grammatical errors in isolation, we should take advantage of the multiple choices. 
Compare.

GKomoku  wrote the best answer. (Just one mistake. The subject of E is  anger , singular. The singular verb  has  is correct in terms of S/V agreement.)
Again, it's instructive that comparison produced the correct answer.
Kudos!

DmitryFarberMPrep · Answer

Again, it seems that someone has gone in and changed a Princeton Review question to make it invalid. For instance, we shouldn't have "health" in A, making us wonder why it's missing elsewhere. More importantly, D shouldn't have the redundant/misleading "potentially overestimating." What is going on?

Here are two links to the correct version:
https://books.google.com/books?id=twJwD ... te&f=false

GKomoku · Answer

generis , thank you for official explanation and correcting my mistake made
anger-has -- noted

generis · Answer

DmitryFarber , I do not know what is going on. The two questions at issue come from a hard copy of a Princeton Review book that I purchased. "Health" is a typo. I inserted the word. I have no idea why; I was probably reviewing text from another posted Verbal question that contained the word "health" while I constructed this post. Below are scans of Princeton's Verbal Workout for the GMAT , 4th edition. One scan is the front cover. The other scan contains the only two questions that I have used from this Princeton book. All other Princeton questions have come from other Princeton Review books. Hard copies. I certainly would never "go in and change" a question "to make it invalid." I pulled this date's SC Butler questions from the copy of the book that I am holding in my hands. I bought the book from a Barnes & Noble store located in a big city in the U.S. I retrieved the book from a shelf myself. I looked at the copyright page. Nothing seems amiss. Copyright law in the U.S. can be brutal. I sincerely doubt that B&N would ever knowingly carry a pirated edition. I will contact the necessary people. I find it odd that when I search for these questions, Google does not bring them up. As mentioned, among the Princeton Review books, this day's two questions are the only two that I have taken from the Verbal Workout, 4th edition. I had no reason to suspect that a hard copy of a book purchased from a national bookseller's physical store in a major city in the U.S. would contain errors. Thank you for letting me know. SC wages and anger questions Princeton Review.jpg Princeton Verbal 4th ed..jpg

VerbalBot · Answer

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Anger has been determined by behavioral economists to make people

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