Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

A. Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.
B. An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that worked well in the past, makes missing signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting ones likely when they do appear.
C. An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past.
D. Executives’ being heavily committed to a course of action, especially if it has worked well in the past, makes them likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpreting them when they do appear.
E. Being heavily committed to a course of action, especially one that has worked well in the past, is likely to make an executive miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.


I chouse E, some say C. You say?

its should be C
in E ' being heavily committed to......." should modify executive.

but the pronouns in C are just terribly vague

bad question if I may say so

i agree.
'it' is ambiguous, because it could potentially refer either to 'course of action' (the intended antecedent) or to 'incipient trouble'. also note that grammatical parallelism doesn't help: both of those possible antecedents are objects of prepositions - neither is the subject of its own clause (which would thereby create parallelism with 'it', which is the subject of its clause).

e is the best choice here. i cringe a bit at the use of 'being' - my first thought is that we could make the sentence better by using a noun, such as 'commitment' - but then you'd need some sort of possessive pronoun to show that it's the executive who's committed. in any case, (e) is definitely the best of the options here, none of which is perfect by any stretch.

Ron,

In your explanation regarding the IT reference, in choice C isn't it clear that IT refers back to course of action which is the intended reference since incipient trouble is the object of the phrase OF INCIPIENT TROUBLE...I always thought it was understood that pronouns can never refer back to an object of any phrase...


W

well, note that both 'course of action' and 'incipient trouble' are objects of prepositional phrases.
upon what difference are you basing your claim that the former is a legitimate antecedent, while the latter is not?

C. An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past.

Ron,

Is it really ambiguous? To me it appeared as if it were referring to course of action.

There is no single trouble in the sentence. There are signs of incipient trouble which has been referred by they.

I am not convinced with the usage of being in E

Tihs is a great question. Thanks for posting.

C says "An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear, especially if it has worked well in the past."


I hesitated between this and E, but ultimately chose E. Choice E wasn't great because of the whole "Being.." thing but C is vague. So I basically did a POE.

Everything is fine until we get to "especially if it has worked in the past." The way it is phrases, we can't tell for sure what has worked in the past. Is that referring to a course of action or misintepretation of signs of incipient trouble? If C is to be correct it should say,

"An executive who is heavily committed to a course of action, especially if it has worked in the past, is likely to miss or misinterpret signs of incipient trouble when they do appear."