Originally developed by ancient Hawaiians, surfing appeals to people due to the sport’s unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops among people in their common quest to conquer nature.
a. surfing appeals to people due to the sport’s unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops
b. surfing’s appeal is its unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops
c. surfing’s appeal to people is due to the sport’s unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and developing camaraderie
d. surfing appeals to people due to the sport’s unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, a backdrop that is unpredictable and that is, by turns, gracefully and serenely violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops
e. surfing appeals to people due to their unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering, an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable, and the camaraderie that often develops

Several items are separated by comma, making it tough to understand several parts in the sentence. Instead of comma, can semicolon be right choice to link various items?
"Originally developed by ancient Hawaiians, surfing appeals to people due to the sport’s unusual confluence of adrenaline, skill, and high paced maneuvering; an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable; and the camaraderie that often develops among people in their common quest to conquer nature."

i've seen this commonly done in many, many sources, most of which are fairly "scholarly" or "formal".

still, to my knowledge, we haven't ever seen this done in an OFFICIAL GMAT PROBLEM, so i'm loath to endorse the practice for the purposes of this test.

if you were to find a sentence that's genuinely AMBIGUOUS with the commas in place (as opposed to just "difficult to parse"), then the semicolons could probably do you some good.
still, i can't really say anything until they turn up in an OFFICIAL problem.

IMO A Simple

.

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Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT

What's wrong with B?

B is wrong because "Originally developed by ancient Hawaiians," refers to Surfing. And not "Surfing's"

correct.

since the initial modifier (Originally developed by ancient Hawaiians) contains a participle and NOT a subject, it is automatically assigned to the subject of the following sentence (which must come directly after the comma).

from the context here, it's obvious that this modifier is supposed to refer to "surfing", so, unless JUST "surfing" (i.e., not surfing's xxxxx) follows the comma, the sentence is incorrect.

This sentence contains three parallel elements: “the unusual confluence,” “an unpredictable backdrop,” and “the camaraderie.” Additionally, the introductory modifying phrase “originally developed by ancient Hawaiians” correctly modifies the noun “surfing.”


The elements : “an unpredictable backdrop,” and “the camaraderie.” are followed by clauses whereas the first element is not.

Does that not break the parallelism.

nah. it's not a violation of parallelism if some nouns have modifiers and others don't.

for proof of this, see #109 in OG11, or #110 in OG12 (same problem). in the correct answer, there is a list of two people. one of the names is followed by a modifier and the other isn't.

what is the OA ?

I was a bit confused between A and E.

I think E is wrong because

it uses "their" which is incorrect, more importantly,

"sport’s unusual confluence of adrenaline" in A seems correct and parallel to the next nouns i.e "sport's skill and high paced .." .

whereas in E "their unusual confluence of adrenaline" incorrectly refers to people and means that its "people's skill and high paced...."

"their" is also mentioned in the non-underlined part of the sentence that makes me think again but I think, its safe to stay with A.

Please discuss !

The correct answer is A, and indeed, "their" refers incorrectly to "people" in (E).

The non-underlined "their" is found in a prepositional phrase that modifies "people," so their = people in this sentence. On the GMAT, if you use a pronoun multiple times in a sentence, it has to refer to the same antecedent each time. If anything, this makes (E) more wrong, as it confirms that (E) says all those things about people instead of surfing.

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Emily Sledge
Instructor
ManhattanGMAT

I don't understand this part of the modifier

an unpredictable backdrop that is, by turns, graceful and serene, violent and formidable,

Shouldn't I have an and to join the adjectives ?

an unpredictable backdrop that is graceful and serene and violent and formidable

an unpredictable backdrop that is X,Y vs X and Y

this is an unusual construction to be sure, and you're unlikely to see it again, but your modification is definitely not the way to deal with this one. you could NEVER correctly use "A and B and C and D" in a sentence..

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Tim Sanders
Manhattan GMAT Instructor

I read somewhere that "due to" has to be replaced by "caused by" and not "because of".
Is my understanding for the definition of "due to" correct? If so, only option B is left as correct answer.
Please clarify.