Hi Ron,

The below sentence is from MGMAT CAT. It is just a sentence so I am posting it over here

Hailed as a key discovery in the science of evolution, the fossils of a large scaly creature resemble both a fish and a land-animal and provide evidence of of a possible missing link

In the above sentence can resemble and provide act as parallel ? If yes then how does it differ from

Hailed as a key discovery in the science of evolution, the fossils of a large scaly creature resemble both a fish and a land-animal, and provide evidence of of a possible missing link

The second one has a comma after animal and the first one does not.

I would really be gratefull to you if you could give some examples on how the comma changes the meaning. I must have got atlest got 10 sentences wrong because of blindly making verbs parallel. Thanks

Hi,

Same confusion out here

Sam drives a car and plays music

Sam drives a car, and plays music

What is the difference ?

Thnx

The two examples given above should not use commas after the "and."

A verb needs some kind of noun to go with it. In both examples, the same noun applies to two verbs, so those two verbs both need to e in the same form (to match with the one noun). So, yes, you've got parallelism in this case.

You might, in the fossils example, say something like:
The fossils of a large, scaly creature resemble both a fish and a land-animal, providing evidence of a possible missing link.

Now we've changed the bit after the comma to be an adverbial modifier, which modifies the entire preceding clause. That's fine.

You'd see the "comma and" setup (in this case) if you had a list of three or more parallel things, not just two, such as:
The fossils resemble a fish, provide evidence, and reside in the Museum of Natural History.

So I'm guessing that the comma issue you've struggled with in the past is a bit different from the examples you posted here. If you have a full problem in which you notice this comma issue that's causing you trouble, post the problem and we can discuss!

_________________
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT