SC : "High in the sky, soaring over the foothills...."

[chintan083]

High in the sky, soaring over the foothills that on hot, dry days look like brushed brown suede, the condor attains a majesty that is rare among birds in flight.

A) High in the sky, soaring over the foothills that on hot, dry days look like brushed brown suede, the condor attains a majesty that is rare among birds in flight.

B) The condor, being high in the sky and soaring over foothills that on hot, dry days look like brushed brown suede, attains a rare majesty among birds in flight.

C) The condor, when it is high in the sky and soars over the foothills that on hot dry days look as if they might be brushed dry suede, attains a majesty that is rare among birds in flight.

D) On hot, dry days, when the foothills look like brushed brown suede and the condor, high in the sky, soars over them, it attains a majesty that is rare among birds in flight.

E) Attaining a majesty that is rare among birds in flight, high in the sky, the condor soars over foothills that look like brushed brown suede on hot, dry days.

Source : Beat The GMAT Practice Question.

OA : (A).

In choice (A), "High in the sky" and "soaring over the foothills....", both modify the noun "the condor". Shouldn't each of the modifiers touch the noun it modifies? Or is (A) correct choice, because "High in the sky" is a verb modifier here?

Thanks for your guidance.

[george.kourdin]

just my 2 cents but construction in A seems like a modifier within a modifier so in a way they are both "touching" the noun condor. moving any of these modifiers around and placing either one of the two in the 2nd half of the sentence would make the sentence nonsensincal.

i agree that A is somewhat off-putting, but it is the best of the options as the other 4 contain glaring errors.

b) - being high in the sky is akward and incorrect. is it there all the time, including this very moment? we should avoid the "being construction". <the> condor is not correct since the noun was not previously introduced anywhere else.


c) when it is high in the sky and soars is just plain wrong. it breaks parallelism. <look as if they might be bright dry suede> is also wrong. they refers to days, not foothills, which is wrong. be brushed dry suede makes zero sense. who/what are we brushing here?

d) disregarding somewhat akward grammatical construction and that in the 2nd half of the sentence, <it> may refer to the sky and not the condor, this answer choice is basically saying that the condor is only awesome on hot/dry days when the foothills are brushed brown suede. on other days that are not so hot and dry, the condor is just an average bird.

e) its somewhat close between E and A, but in E the construction of the modifiers is incorrect. unlike in A, high in the sky obstructs the flow. i also think that <attaining> best retains its original meaning in present form. the condor does not gradually attain the this majesty. it is not an ongoing process where the condor does not have the majesty and than due to some XYZ factors, it attains it and becomes a rare bird in flight. the condor simply has it. not sure if this makes sense but this was one of the reasons why i opted to eluminate this answer choice.

[jnelson0612]

Wow, nice George. Yes, I agree with George's assessment . . . everything else has glaring errors and it does appear to be a modifier within a modifier. I have seen this construction before in written english.