Approved April 24, 1800, the act of Congress that made provision for the removal of the government of the United States to the new federal city, Washington, D.C., also established the Library of Congress.

A. Approved April 24, 1800, the act of Congress that made provision for the removal of the government of the United States to the new federal city, Washington, D.C., also established
B. The act of Congress, which was approved April 24, 1800, making provision for the removal of the government of the United States to the new federal city, Washington, D.C., also established
C. The act of Congress approved April 24, 1800, which made provision for the removal of the government of the United States to the new federal city, Washington, D.C., and established
D. Approved April 24, 1800, making provision for the removal of the government of the United States to the new federal city, Washington, D.C., the act of Congress also established
E. Approved April 24, 1800, the act of Congress made provision for the removal of the government of the United States to the new federal city, Washington, D.C., also establishing


I chose E, the supposed OA is A.

A = the act of Congress that made ...., also established <--- not an indepednet claushe, WRONG!!

anyone?

that is, indeed, an independent clause. the problem is that it's a very long independent clause - the 'middleman' itself is longer than most actual sentences. that's a doozy.

remember that you should either condense or eliminate these interloping constructions (modifiers, prepositional phrases, and the like) so that you can better understand the structure of the sentence. if you do that here, you get the following:
the act that did X ... also did Y
that's an independent clause.

--

the big problem with choice e is that it strips 'the act of congress' of a necessary modifier - so that, instead of saying 'the act of congress that did blah blah blah', it just says 'the act of congress' - as if congress has only ever performed one act in its history. that's an unacceptable (and absurd) change in meaning.

Instructors, a question here.

In the above choice (E), is it correct to say X did Y, also doing Z?

Should it not be : X did Y, doing Z?

Is the use of 'also' correct here, if not redundant?

Great question, Eyunni! Choice (E) in its entirety:

Approved April 24, 1800, the act of Congress made provision for the removal of the government of the United States to the new federal city, Washington, D.C., also establishing the Library of Congress.

The bold text is the non-modifer "core" of the sentence, of the form "X made Y, also establishing Z." You may note that the comma before "also" is required after Washington, D.C., therefore is independent of the question you and the original poster raise about the final clause.

There are two potential problems/fixes to this core.
1) Parallelism: "X made Y and established Z" would be better.
2) Improper modifier form: "X made Y, establishing Z" is grammatically correct, as you suggested.

But I think #2 creates an unintended meaning: The act of Congress made provision (for moving to D.C.), thereby establishing the Library of Congress. It wasn't the move to D.C. that created the Library of Congress. Rather, the act did both of those things.

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Emily Sledge
Instructor
ManhattanGMAT

Curious. why is the sentence using the word removal when the intended meaning is that government was moved from Phila to DC.

As they say GMAT also looks for the best structure

If we remove the blah blah from middle.... let's look at the two structures:

Option A: Approved April 24, the act that made the provision ABC, also established XYZ.

Option E: Approved April 24, the act made provision ABC, also establishing XYZ

The option A looks more consistent with its structure than option E

Can anyone tell me why D is wrong?

The core structure is Approved..., making provision for...., the act of Congress also established....

Any error in it? Pls help to explain, thanks!

Can anyone pls advise why D is wrong here? Thanks!

zhuyujun,

D is wrong because, it is following the sentence structure,
<Modifier>,<Modifier><Subject>
which is wrong.

Good sentence structure should be
<Modifier>,<Subject>,<Modifier>

that is very well done in A and E.
Hope this would have answered your question

C - changed the meaning by misplacing the modifier.

B - suffers from a couple of issues
1) tense change - was approved, making, established
2) parellism

E also suffers from above issue

I was rather confused about the word"also" in option A. For me, it is a strong indication that "established" and "made" are parallel, thus making the whole sentence incomplete. That's all the reason why I rule A out. So here why don't we take this factor into consideration

Also,in option E,there is a ",also doing " structure. Does it count if I want a "comma&ing" structure,or we simply don't put anything else into the"comma&ing" structure?

Thank you~

Hi Ron,
1) In one of your other posts about participle modifer, you mentioned that the participle modifer should modify the action in the preceding clause, can i use this to eliminate B and D as making modifes approved?
2) Can i eliminate C based on which seems to modify the date?
3) Does B need the preposition "in", "which was approved in date" or can i say which was approved date?
4) Also you mentioned above that " the big problem with choice e is that it strips 'the act of congress' of a necessary modifier - so that, instead of saying 'the act of congress that did blah blah blah', it just says 'the act of congress' - as if congress has only ever performed one act in its history. that's an unacceptable (and absurd) change in meaning."
I read the following in telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/recession/7386741/UKs-economic-recovery-is-under-threat.html

The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) predicted the economy would grow by 2.1pc next year, compared with its previous December forecast of 2.3pc growth. It maintained its forecast for 1pc growth in 2010. The group also warned the threat of a double-dip recession in the short term had not been eliminated.

My question is 1) do we need that ? as in the group also warned that the threat ...
2) why is it "had not been eliminated" instead of "has not been eliminated"?



Thanks,
Raj

Hi,

I saw this SC question as my first verbal question in GMATPrep 1. This question certainly doesn't seem a 'medium' difficulty question. I thought that the first question is always a medium difficulty question. Is this correct? I got a 49 for the Quant section. Is this why the first verbal question I saw was above medium difficulty?

Thanks!

Jayant, the GMAT ignores your quant performance when dishing out verbal problems. Even if you had it on good authority that this is a harder than average question (good luck getting that data!), you have to realize that our description of the process is an oversimplification and that you are not money-back-guaranteed to get a 50.00 percentile problem on number 1. :) The big thing to keep in mind is that for all the talk about how the CAT algorithm works, any thought you give to it during the test represents a less than optimal allocation of your mental energies on the test. Ignore it, and just focus on the question at hand..

@rajinikanth

Participle modifiers can come before or after the noun but must touch the noun, where touching can include being connected to the noun through a chain of other modifiers also modifying that noun. The big reason you can eliminate B and D is because of the ambiguity they create that could have been fixed by some simple changes in wording like consolidating modifiers and making them parallel rather than in series..

Yes, there is a problem in answer choice C regarding what the "which" refers to. i find that although the GMAT is not 100% consistent on this point, a "which" is almost always tied to the specific word that occurs right before the comma, regardless of any other noun options present in the sentence. i place this in my category of "99% rules", ones that might bite you once if you take the GMAT 17 times but that you can apply with confidence if you don't have 5 minutes to diagram the sentence fully and investigate every nuance..

B doesn't need an "in" any more than the other answer choices do; they all use the same construction for the date, so you should ignore the date itself here..

Kudos for pulling examples of incorrect GMAT grammar from UK newspapers! i find The Economist to be an excellent source for issue spotting. :) Anyway, yes you need a "that" in order to introduce a subordinate clause. Otherwise you're bringing in a second SV combination into the top level of the sentence. This is exactly analogous to incorrect choice E in V90 on the OG..

And as for the "had not" versus "has not", it could be either depending on the context and the intent of the author. Try it both ways in your mind and see if you can envision a back story for each of those two possibilities. This is also a good idea to try with any situations where it looks like parallelism fails, such as the sloths question (#124). You want to get rid of something that isn't parallel only if you are sure that the items in question MUST be parallel..

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Tim Sanders
Manhattan GMAT Instructor

hello

Somebody in above posts mentioned the reason for rejecting choice D is that 'which' seems to modify date instead of the act of congress...

if this is correct if am really getting confused with use of which directly after comma...

I know few rules for use of which after comma.
1) it should unambigously refer to one thing
2) sometimes verb after which can let you decide to choose one antecendent for which , if two are present for eg...

X and Y, which are ( if X is plural and Y is singular the which refers to X)

here in choice... we can infer that only act can do something so which modifies only act...

Please tell me if there are other erasons for rejectting C..... or i am missing somes rules for which after comma.

thanks
Ajit

(d) is incorrect because it purports to modify "the act of congress" with nonessential modifiers (i.e., modifiers that are set off by commas). if that's the case -- i.e., if these modifiers are allowed to be nonessential -- then that means "the act of congress" can stand on its own.
that would imply that there has only been one act of congress, ever.
not good.

another example:

The course offered on Wednesdays will fit nicely into your schedule. --> in this example, "offered on wednesdays" is an essential modifier, signifying that there are also other courses (and so we need the essential modifier to narrow the possibilities to one).

Offered on Wednesdays, the course will fit nicely into your schedule. --> this time we have a nonessential modifier, indicating that "the course" can stand on its own. this doesn't make sense unless there is only one course.

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