In preparation for the cold winter months, it was the usual custom for prehistoric people to gather and preserve, with smoke or by salting it, as much meat that they could during the summer.

(a) It was the usual custom for prehistoric people to gather and preserve, with smoke or by salting it, as much meat that they could during the summer.

(b) prehistoric people usually gathered as much meat as they could during the summer, preserving it either by smoking or salting

(C) It was the usual custom of prehistoric people to gather and preserve, either with smoke or by salting, as much meat that they could during the summer

(d) prehistoric people had the usual custom of gathering and preserving as much meat, either by smoking or salting it, as they could during the summer

(e) It was usually that prehistoric people would gather and preserve as much meat as they could, which was either smoked or salted during the summer

Choice B -is the answer. However, doesnt the "it" after the comma have a vague antecedent.. Cant it refer to preserving the summer.

Choice D- though wordier isnt it the better answer?

Kamesh, this is the reason you can't eliminate answer choices based on pronoun ambiguities. Can summer be preserved? No...
Only meat can be preserved.What did prehistoric people gather----Meat. They are going to preserve it---Here "it" refers to meat and nothing else.This is where logic of the sentence comes into play.


Hey, but hang on- the items are not parallel in B or D...I guess this is an mgmat question. Right?
either by X or Y---Wrong...it should read either by x or by y or by either x or y

None of the answer choices are correct....
Can someone shed some light on this ...

Yes B looks the best choice. However, i have the same question either by X or Y - is that correct ?

Can instructors shed some light here ?

Isn't option 'B' is having a parallelism issue in gathered & preserving?

Nope...That's the -ing modifier

the original post correctly points out a problem. this is one of our questions, so we'll be sure to go fix that -- thanks to the original poster for pointing this out.

i've also moved this thread to the proper folder. (it was originally posted in the GMATPREP folder)

gokul_nair is correct about the comma + -ing modifier.