Young female ballet dancers and gymnasts sometimes fail to maintain

VeritasPrepKarishma

Hi,

Can you please explain how "they" is ambiguous in E here when the subject for E is clearly Young female ballet dancers and gymnasts

Aside from the meaning issues,

Is there any grammatical problem in (A) ?

mikemcgarry

mahakmalik

The problem with E is that the pronoun they is ambiguous. It could refer either to habits or to dancers and gymnasts.

The omission of the word ballet seems to be inadvertent; in a GMAT test, you would probably not find such omissions.

hi sayantanc2k
I really confused with this one, in E " they" don't have an ambiguity, because habits don't desire to be thin
I remember the expert in other questions that pronoun should make sense if we want to say pronoun ambiguity

could you elaborate this?

Young female ballet dancers and gymnasts sometimes fail to maintain good eating habits caused by the desire to be as thin as possible.


(A) Young female ballet dancers and gymnasts sometimes fail to maintain good eating habits caused by the desire to be as thin as possible.

(B) Good eating habits sometimes fail to be maintained by young female ballet dancers and gymnasts caused by desiring to be as thin as possible.

(C) Because they desire to be as thin as possible, good eating habits are sometimes not maintained by young female ballet dancers and gymnasts.

(D) Because they desire to be as thin as possible, young female ballet dancers and gymnasts sometimes fail to maintain good eating habits.

(E) Young female dancers and gymnasts sometimes fail to maintain good eating habits because they desire to be as thin as possible.

IMO D.

A ) Original sentence- maintain good eating habits caused by the desire to be as thin as possible - conveys wrong meaning
B ) Awkward sentence
C ) "Because they desire to be as thin as possible" can not modify "good eating habits "
D ) "Because they desire to be as thin as possible" correctly modifies young female ballet dancers - no pronoun reference error - correct answer choice
E ) they - can refer to Young female ballet dancers or good eating habits - pronoun reference error.

Why a) conveys wrong meaning?
The Kaplan solution says:
"(A) is out because of the illogical placement of the phrase starting with "caused."
But I don't understand why is it an illogical placement

Dear Friends,

Here is a detailed explanation to this question-

Meaning is crucial to solving this problem:
Understanding the intended meaning is key to solving this question; the intended meaning of this sentence is that because young female ballet dancers and gymnasts desire to be as thin as possible, they sometimes fail to maintain good eating habits.

Concepts tested here: Meaning + Modifiers + Pronouns + Awkwardness/Redundancy

• In a “phrase + comma + noun” construction, the phrase must correctly modify the noun; this is one of the most frequently tested concepts on GMAT sentence correction.

A: This answer choice alters the meaning of the sentence through the phrase "good eating habits caused by the desire to be as thin as possible"; the construction of this phrase illogically implies that the good eating habits that the ballet dancers and gymnasts sometimes fail to maintain are causedd by the desire to be as thin as possible; the intended meaning is that because the ballet dancers and gymnasts desire to be as thin as possible, they sometimes fail to maintain good eating habits.

B: This answer choice alters the meaning of the sentence through the phrase “young female ballet dancers and gymnasts caused by desiring to be as thin as possible”; the construction of this phrase illogically implies that the ballet dancers and gymnasts were caused by the desire to be as thin as possible; the intended meaning is that the ballet dancers' and gymnasts' failure to maintain good eating habits was caused by their desire to be as thin as possible. Further, Option B uses the passive voice construction “fail to be maintained”, rendering it needlessly indirect.

C: This answer choice incorrectly uses “Because they desire to be as thin as possible” to modify “good eating habits”, incorrectly implying that the eating habits themselves desire to be as thin as possible; the intended meaning is that the ballet dancers and gymnasts desire to be as thin as possible; please remember, in a “phrase + comma + noun” construction, the phrase must correctly modify the noun.

D: Correct. This answer choice correctly uses “Because they desire to be as thin as possible” to modify “young female ballet dancers and gymnasts”, conveying the intended meaning- that because young female ballet dancers and gymnasts desire to be as thin as possible, they sometimes fail to maintain good eating habits - and avoiding the pronoun error seen in Option E. Further, Option D is free of any awkwardness or redundancy.

E: Trap. This answer choice suffers from pronoun ambiguity; it is unclear whether “they” refers to “ballet dancers and gymnasts” or “eating habits”.

Hence, D is the best answer choice.

To understand the concept of "Phrase Comma Subject" and "Subject Comma Phrase" on GMAT, you may want to watch the following video (~1 minute):



All the best!
Experts' Global Team

Hi, this is so disappointing!
Can "eating habits" desire something? How can "they" refer to eating habits. It will be very upsetting if GMAT actually designs a sentence like this.

Posted from my mobile device

GMAT Ninja, if you could please explain.

Pronoun ambiguity is not an absolute rule as you say. Why do we reject option E based on that then? isn't E structured much better than D?