This is a GmatPrep question. Shouldn't "With no natural predators and with expanses of green suburban neighborhoods where there is no hunting" modify New Jersey. OA is C.

With no natural predators and expanses of green suburban neighborhoods that allow no hunting, wildlife officials estimate the New Jersey deer population to have grown to exceed 175,000.

A. With no natural predators and expanses of green suburban neighborhoods that allow no hunting, wildlife officials estimate the New Jersey deer population to have

B. With no natural predators and with expanses of green suburban neighborhoods that donot allow hunting, wildlife officails' estimate of deer population in New Jersey has

C. With no natural predators and with expanses of green suburban neighborhoods where there is no hunting, the Deer Population in New Jersey, wildlife officials estimate, has

D. Without natural predators and no hunting allowed in expanses of green suburban neighborhoods, New Jersey has a deer population that wildlife officials estimate to have

E. Without natural predators and with expanses of green suburban neighbourhoods where there is no hunting, wildlife officials in New Jersey estimate a deer population that has

NEWYORK can't have any PREDATORS in thsi world ha haa :((((..
only deer population can have some predators...so it should modify deer population ..not the NEWYORK..

public service announcement: new york and new jersey are two different places.

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back to your regularly scheduled programming:

the above poster has correctly summarized why 'deer population' is the right noun to follow the opening modifier: there are no predators that threaten to eat new jersey (political metaphors notwithstanding).

i agree that describing a deer population as 'with expanses of green suburban neighborhoods' is somewhat ridiculous - in my mind, it conjures an image of smartly attired deer touring the latest subdivisions along with their antlered sales representatives - but it's better than the awful lack of parallelism in choice d (without natural predators and no hunting allowed - ugh).

never forget that you're often reduced to picking the choice that's least awful, rather than the 'best' one.

Ron Purewal,

Doesn't 'without natural predators' actually mean, 'without natural predators inside New Jersey', in D ?
I mean can't D indicate that natural predators are in New Jersey ?

i'm going to assume that you meant to write the orange "no" above, without which that question doesn't really make sense.

i suppose that could make grammatical sense, but it doesn't have the correct meaning. the sentence is supposed to be saying that the deer population doesn't have natural predators -- i.e., that there could perfectly well be species that are natural predators of other animals, just not of deer.
if you change the sentence to your suggested wording, you have now unintentionally modified the sentence so that it's saying that no animals have any predators anywhere in the state.
that's an unacceptable change of meaning.

If the first half of option A were correct, is there anything wrong with the second half of the underlined text?

"....estimate the New Jersey deer population to have" grown to exceed....

yeah, that's still unidiomatic.

you wouldn't write "estimate X to have VERBed"; it should be "estimate that X has VERBed".

Is "suburban neighborhoods that do not allow hunting" grammatically correct in Choice B?

Thanks!

GRAMMATICALLY, yes, this is absolutely ok.

on the other hand, SEMANTICALLY (i.e., with respect to the meaning of the words), it's questionable -- this decision is predicated on whether we are allowed to say that a neighborhood can "allow" something.

the problem here is that the neighborhood is right on the borderline of this sort of issue. for instance, a person can clearly "allow" something, while an inanimate object (such as a table or chair) clearly cannot "allow" something.
on the other hand, collectives made up of people -- such as a neighborhood, a society, etc. -- may or may not be able to "allow" something; this is merely a convention of usage. unfortunately, the conventions of usage can vary from source to source, so we would have to look at official problems to find out where gmac stands on this sort of thing.
in any case, i bet that this sort of semantic distinction is way too subtle to be dispositive in an actual problem.

Ron:

Sorry I need to reopen this thread. I want to know what does the phrase "where there is no hunting" modify? was it modifying the word "neighborhoods" or "expanses"?

from the answer choices I can tell the phrase was modifying the noun "expanses" (otherwise we would have to switch to plural verb "are"), but how can I tell that in the first place?
Thanks in advance

the word "where" is not a pronoun, so you can be a little more flexible in its application. in particular, i've seen sentences in which "where" refers to single nouns, other sentences in which it refers to noun phrases (NOUN1 + preposition + NOUN2, or NOUN + modifier), and still others in which it refers to prepositional phrases.
in sentences like these, then, you should be a little bit cautious about eliminating based on "where", unless the most directly preceding place name is just wrong, or makes no sense at all in context. (for instance, see the problem about baltic sea sediments in the official guide verbal supplement -- i think it's #79 in that supplement. there's one choice in which "where" refers back to the sediments themselves, a location that just doesn't make any sense given the context of the problem.)



nope. incorrect analysis.

the verb in the structure "there is / there are" is determined by the FOLLOWING noun, not the noun(s) that come before the structure.
for instance, both of the following structures are correct:
on the table, there was a cellular phone.
on the table, there were two cellular phones.



in this sentence, i don't know that you can single out either of those as the antecedent -- they both make sense. however, this sort of ambiguity is not a problem, since both of these nouns ("expanses" and "neighborhoods") are actually referring to exactly the same geographical entities.

Hi Rone,

I also choose C as an answer. But don't you think "deer" is a noun which modified by With no natural predators" and not "deer population".

both of those would be reasonably logical; it's logical to say that the deer population has/doesn't have predators, and it's also logical to say that the deer have/don't have predators.

note that this is a non-issue in the problem at hand, since the form of all five answer choices is "deer population".

Hi,Ron

I have a problem with "with + NOUN" that acts as an open modifier.
should this structure always modify the subject of the main clause?

in this PREP question,can "with/without + NOUN" modify the whole sentence as an adverbial modifier that clarifies the reason why deer population has grown to exceed 175,000?
(therefore,we just can't eliminate false choices on this basis...?)

wait for your replay.

If i'm interpreting your question correctly, the answer is that the "with" phrase opening the sentence must modify the noun after the comma. That said, i'm skeptical of this problem in general because of the objection Ron brought up earlier. i will not be answering any further questions on this one until i see a screen shot of the problem from the GMAT Prep software, and i encourage the other instructors to do the same..

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Tim Sanders
Manhattan GMAT Instructor