SC: Fossils and Whales, SV Agreement and prep phrase mod

[RonPurewal]

you should process the sentence like this:
Fossils of
a whale that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids have been recovered by paleontologists

The text in green and red are parallel ?

huh?
here's the post you're trying to quote:
post39059.html#p39059

you're highlighted the wrong parts of the sentence; note in particular that "that" is NOT included in my analysis of that parallelism.

the parallel structures are "beached ..." and "was ... butchered ...", which are both verbs. "that" isn't part of the parallel structure.
(one of these verbs is in active voice while the other is in passive, but voices, like tenses, are a function of meaning and are irrelevant to grammatical parallelism.)

--

in the future, you should use the "Quote" button to quote posts; not only is it much easier, but doing so will automatically preserve all the boldface, italics, underlines, etc. in the post that you're quoting (thus preventing transcription errors like this one). if there is excess material that you don't want to quote, just delete it from within the quote.

[manassingh]

Thank you Ron. The link was very helpfull.

[jnelson0612]

Good. :-)

[davetzulin]

"having been beached" is a passive voice construction, which in this case is inappropriate. (this does NOT mean that the passive voice is incorrect in general -- there are plenty of other situations in which the passive voice is preferred or even required -- but it just doesn't work here.)

Ron, i agree now that this answer choice is wrong because of the comma on one side. I completely missed that when I got this problem on gmat prep 2.

However, I purposely chose this answer because of the passive voice construction. I thought to myself, why would a whale beach itself. I thought a whale may die in the water, and then the waves will beach it, making it suitable for passive voice.

or is this a suicidal whale?

[RonPurewal]

well, you've learned a new lesson about the verb "beach": you've learned that it can be an active-voice verb, meaning, roughly, "to wash up on the beach".

the active voice here works in roughly the same way as in "the car crashed into the tree".
i.e., you could write "the car was crashed into the tree" -- if you are trying to emphasize, in a weird way, the fact that some anonymous person crashed the car -- but, in the (more likely) case that you are just describing the fact that the car hit the tree, you would use the active "crashed".

[shah.abhilash]

Would you please explain why (D) is wrong?

I have two other questions on this SC:
1. The modifier inside the bracket {} is a parallel structure using "AND". There is "was" with butchered, but no "was" with beached. is this because the sentence tries to say that the whale came to the beach on its own, or the "was" is omitted and the beached itself as a past participle also indicated the passive voice? Otherwise these two are not considered structure paralleled, right?

2. Is then subsequently considered a redundancy? Can I certainly eliminate ACs using them together?

Fossils of a whale {that beached on an African shore more than a million years ago and was subsequently butchered by hominids} have been recovered by paleontologists.


Thank you!

Hi ROn,

We can delete options C and D saying the subject is still the "FOSSIL" and fossil cant be butuchered millions of years ago by hominids. Wrong minor modifier. :-)

[RonPurewal]

We can delete options C and D saying the subject is still the "FOSSIL" and fossil cant be butuchered millions of years ago by hominids. Wrong minor modifier. :-)[/color]

no.
in (d), "beached" and "butchered" are pretty clearly parallel (although there are other errors), so you can attribute both of them to the animal.

in (c), there's an issue with "which", but the issue is that it basically doesn't refer to anything legitimate.

in neither of those choices can you attribute those things to the fossils.

[yangfan0307]

Sorry for bring up this thread, I have one question regarding (A),
why it omits the "that" in front of "was subsequently butchered".

thanks.

[RonPurewal]

Sorry for bring up this thread, I have one question regarding (A),
why it omits the "that" in front of "was subsequently butchered".

thanks.

There's no need to repeat "that", unless the sentence is ambiguous without it.

[yangfan0307]

I now understand, thanks Ron, I learned so many stuff from your posts.

[RonPurewal]

I now understand, thanks Ron, I learned so many stuff from your posts.

Great to hear.

[DiJ92]

Dear ron,


in choice E, there is a construction X having done. Is it correct to use this kind of constructions. thank you

[RonPurewal]

Dear ron,


in choice E, there is a construction X having done. Is it correct to use this kind of constructions. thank you

short answer:
i'd bet against any sentence containing this.

--

long answer:

read this.
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/foru ... ml#p112670

now think about the difference between 'people who have __ed' and 'people having __ed'.
see, the idea that "someone has __ed" is normally permanent. (People who have seen a certain movie will always be people who have seen that movie.)
as per the link, 'who have __ed' suggests that something is permanent, while 'having __ed' suggests that it is transient/temporary. so, the former is generally going to make more sense here.

[DiJ92]

thanks a lot, ron

[RonPurewal]

you're welcome.