To meet the rapidly rising market demand for fish and seafood, suppliers are growing fish twice as fast as their natural growth rate, cutting their feed allotment by nearly half and raising them on special diets

A) their natural growth rate, cutting their feed allotment
B) their natural growth rate, their feed allotment cut
C) growing them naturally, cutting their feed allotment
D) they grow naturally, cutting their feed allotment
E) they grow naturally, with their feed allotment cut

I initially selected C, but that is incorrect according to GmatPrep. OA is D. Can someone explain the difference between C and D and why is D is correct. Also what is "their, they, them" referring to? What is plural - fish?

Thanks!

Cutting in d completes the parallel in that ends in ing...also plural of fish is fish.

But cutting in C is placed in the same place. Can someone clarify between C and D? Thanks!

C) growing them naturally, cutting their feed allotment

growing them naturally doesn't make much logical sense. You 'let them grow naturally' , i.e., without intervention.

D) they grow naturally, cutting their feed allotment

The fact that there is no human intervention is clear here.

agreed on all counts.
well done.

1) Why is a wrong?
2) is there a difference between their, them and they in this question that makes one right over the other?
3) Are there grammatical errors with A and C or is it wrong just based on meaning?

one question.. are the pronoun they and thier are correctly refering to thier antecedent. i am confused beacause 'They', is close to 'suppliers' so, it may refer to supplier.
please clarify

I have eliminated B, C, and E.

Can someone explain difference between A and D?

in this case, you have a problem of redundancy:
a RATE can't be FAST.
* the rate can be high;
* the increase itself can be fast.
similarly,
a height can't be tall (a person can be tall, or a height can be greater than...)
a bank account can't be rich (a person can be rich, or a bank account can contain a large amount of money)
etc.

lest you think this is just a matter of excessive nitpicking on our part, this difference is corroborated by several official problems.



each of those is actually used correctly.
"their" is a possessive.
"them" is the object of a verb (in the case where it's used here, it's the object of "growing")
"they" is a subject.

actually, in the thousands of official problems that i've seen, i have seen a total of ZERO problems in which a pronoun is incorrect because it's in the wrong case (subject/object/possessive). for instance, i have NEVER seen a problem in which a sentence is wrong because it uses, say, "them" instead of "they". so at this point i would bet good money that they will never test that.

the closest thing i've ever seen is a couple of problems that incorrectly use "it" where the context would dictate "itself", or vice versa.



just meaning.

the meaning problem with (a) is explained above.

(c) suggests that even natural growth still has to be performed by the suppliers.

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

this is a good point -- the correct answer to this problem, yet again, contains a pronoun that is technically ambiguous.

however, as we've seen again and again and again and again, not all ambiguous pronouns are incorrect!

so here's the simplest way of making the decision:

1) if you see an AMBIGUOUS PRONOUN that is REPLACED BY THE CORRECT NOUN in OTHER ANSWER CHOICES, then ELIMINATE the ambiguous pronoun and keep the specific noun.
for an example, see problem 68 in the blue verbal supplement, in which "them" is split against "these companies".

HOWEVER,
2) if you see an ambiguous pronoun that is NOT replaced by the correct noun in any of the other answer choices, then DON'T eliminate!
for an example, see problem 21 in the blue verbal supplement (in which the correct answer contains a technically ambiguous pronoun).
or see the problem in this thread!

also:
in general, OBJECTS OF PREPOSITIONS are very rarely the antecedents of pronouns. (i won't say never -- but rarely enough that, if you have to make a random guess, this is probably a pretty good standard by which to make such a guess.)
for instance:
if you have "the cat in the box", then it is very unlikely that a pronoun will be able to stand for "box".
see #29 in the blue verbal supplement, choices (a) and (b).

--

in the problem at hand, "they" is not split against "(those) fish", so we can't confidently eliminate it.

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

Hi,

The answer to the question and the logic that should be used for such question is not clear at all.

Can you please explain the answer. What is wrong with 'C' ?

"growing them naturally" is illogical.
in this construction, "them" (= fish) is the OBJECT of “growing”. this implies that someone else must be growing the fish -- which doesn't make sense if we're talking about natural growth.

notice that the correct answer contains “they grow naturally”, a more accurate description of what actually happens -- the fish just grow, by themselves.

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

Hi Ron, can’t understand how D can be correct? MGMAT SC guide says that a pronoun in a clause can be thought of as referring to a noun playing a similar role in a parallel clause. In the case (option D), the clauses we have are:

1. Suppliers are growing fish
2. They grow naturally

So, to me, ‘they’ in D is referring to ‘suppliers’. While logically this doesn’t make sense, I recollect another post of yours which says that logic cannot compensate for grammatical error.

Please clarify.

did you see this post (which is about three posts up, on this same thread)?
post40400.html#p40400

gmac is frustratingly inconsistent on the topic of pronouns and their antecedents -- i.e., it's pretty much impossible to formulate simple rules about pronoun ambiguity -- so that is a nice workaround.
it's very important to know that there are lots and lots and lots (and lots) of correct official answers that technically contain ambiguous pronouns.

_________________
Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity [that] religion is powerless to bestow.
C.F. Forbes

Thanks Ron. Appreciate your response and share your frustration:(