himanshumalhotra1990 wrote:
Nightmare007 wrote:
when he could no longer play violin himself, Howard taught, imparted his knowledge to students to encourage them to be as successful as he once was.
a. imparted his knowledge to students to encourage
b. and he imparted his knowledge to students and encouraged
c. and imparting his knowledge to students encouraged
d. imparting his knowledge to students and encouraged
e. imparting his knowledge to students and encouraging
+kudos if you got it wrong .
Help required. Why i find this question put in a bad format.
I can't find parallelism here nor i can find it complete.
If I consider
imparting knowledge and
encouraging students as modifiers of
Howard taught, option E seems correct.
However, consider this structure:
Howard taught,
imparting his knowledge to students and
encouraged students... Here taught and encouraged should be parallel as in option D.
Is option D wrong because there is no comma after students? If there was a comma after
students, would
encouraged be considered parallel with
taught?
Experts - Kindly comment if my understanding is correct. I faced a similar issue with another question. Any help here would be highly appreciated.
sayantanc2k mikemcgarry daagh egmat himanshumalhotra1990 Mahmud6 There are a few problems with that interpretation of D.
First, yes, the lack of a comma is a problem. Without the comma, the word "and" clearly links the two adjoining items ("imparting" and "encouraged"). With the comma, we might in theory see "imparting his knowledge to students" as an aside between two parallel past tense verbs. However, this would still be ruined by the use of the pronoun "them." This clearly refers to the word "students" in the previous term. This links the two parts together, showing that the author's intent is for those two parts to work together. If we had any doubt, we might also notice that
none of the other answer choices make "taught" and "encouraged" (or any form thereof) parallel. We'd only see a right answer that deviated from
all the others if the other version had a clear flaw of meaning or grammar. To clarify the problem, simply take the proposed "modifier" out and see if the sentence still works:
When he could no longer play violin himself, Howard taught and encouraged them to be as successful as he once was.Nope! We can drop D.
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