Data gathered by weather satellites has been analyzed by scientists, reporting that the Earth's northern latitudes have become about ten percent greener sicne 1980, due to more vigorous plant growth associated with warmer temperatures and higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

A) Data gathered by weather satellites has been analyzed by scientists, reporting that the Earth's northern latitudes have

B) Data gathered by weather satellites has been analyzed by scientists, and they report the Earth's northern latitudes as having

C) After analyzing data gathered by weather satellites, scientists report that the Earth's northern latitudes have

D) After analysis of data, gathered by weather satellites, scientists report that the Earth's northern latitudes as having

E) After data gathered by weather satellites was analyzed by scientists, who report that the Earth's northern latitudes have


I eliminated A because the ans choice gives an impression that Data is doing the reporting, which is incorrect. Moreover, we do have ans choice with active voice and this one uses passive voice.

B is out because it says Data gathered has been analyzed (core), and they (data) report. Scientists are reporting not the data.

Is there any specific issue with D? Between C & D, D is wordier than C. Is there any other issue wiht D?

Is E a run on the sentence? because it says After data gathered was analyzed due to more ...

For D, after the word "that", it is not a complete clause.
For E, there is no main clause.

Hei's got it.

D:
"scientists report that the latitudes as having..."
This is the Subject-Verb-THAT-Subject-Verb-Object structure. "As having" is not a main verb.

E:
This is a sentence fragment. A run-on is when you connect two independent clauses with a comma (and nothing else). Here, we've got two dependent clauses and no independent clause. The first bit "After... scientists" is not independent because of the word "after." The second bit "who report... dioxide" is also not independent because that whole thing is a noun modifier, as indicated by the word "who."

Hi Stacey,

Could you please elaborate on this structure

Subject-Verb-THAT-Subject-Verb-Object structure ...

Further, in general I am having problems identifying the main verb in complex structures as the one above
... I thought "become" can act as the main verb here...



Thanks in Advance,
Anon

1)
sv(that)svo is extremely common: i knew that you had the tickets.
it looks a bit strange when written out as a linguistic formula, but it's one of the most common structures in the english language. it should be a simple exercise for you to create several of your own sentences with this structure.

2)
to find the main verb of a sentence, you need to strip away the following 'decorations':
* modifiers of all kinds
* prepositional phrases
* appositive phrases
* subordinate clauses
you can eliminate these features extremely mechanically, without so much as a thought to the meaning of the sentence. (in fact, thinking about the meaning of the sentence will probably hamper your abliity to eliminate these things.)
if you eliminate these in choice (e), you'll find that you have nothing left: 'after ... scientists' is a prepositional phrase, and 'who report that... dioxide' is one giant subordinate clause.