GMAT Prep CD Sentence Correction

Simply because they are genetically engineered does not make it any more likely for plants to become an invasive or persistent weed, according to a decade-long study published in the journal Nature.

A) Same
B) because it is genetically engineered does not make a plant any more likely to
C) being genetically engineered does not make it any more likely that plants will
D) being genetically engineered does not make a plant any more likely to
E) being genetically engineered does not make a plant any more likely that it will become

I knew that the plant had to be singular to match up with the rest of the sentence. So, I knew it had to be B, D, or E. I chose B b/c I wanted to stay away from the "being" here. Can you please provide some insight on what rule dictates that D (vs. B) is the answer?

Thanks.

"make a plant more likely" is a better idiom than "makes it more likely for a plant" alo B is unnecessarily verbose & D presents the same idea in a more concise manner

I've seen this one before - this is the only official question in 10 years that I have seen use "being" correctly. So it is still generally a good rule to avoid being, but use it more as a tiebreak - look for other stuff first.

So you knew to get rid of A and C. B violates a little known thing that the GMAT writers follow though it is not an official grammar rule - more a choice. It introduces a subject pronoun before the noun itself. Subject pronouns and nouns can be directly interchanged; as such, the test writers prefer to use the noun first and then later use a subject pronoun (if necessary). Note that I am specifically limiting this to subject pronouns, not object or possessive pronouns. Most people read a subject-pronoun-first situation as "awkward" though they don't really know why.

And just study D from the point of view of: this is one of the only ways to use "being" correctly, so familiarize yourself with it.

_________________
Stacey Koprince
Instructor
Director of Online Community
ManhattanGMAT

Hey Stacey,

The only way is ---"Being" used as Modifier? am I correct?

Please comment on the correct usage os Being.

Saurabh Malpani

nope. if 'being' were a modifier, then it wouldn't make sense in its current location, as you'll soon see:

this sentence has the following form: X does not make...
therefore, whatever goes in the 'x' slot has to be, or function as, a noun. this rules out a-b immediately (these are subordinate clauses, which can't function as nouns).

in choices c-d-e, the 'being' is a gerund (the -ing form that functions as a noun, as in the sentence taking overdoses of vitamins isn't good for your health). since gerunds function as nouns, that structure is permissible.

Thanks!!

Happy New Year!

Hi, does "become" itself convey the sense/meaning of "future" and so "will" in E is unnecessary?
Thanks in advance.

You are right that "will" is unnecessary in E. But I would give a slightly different explanation:

You could either say

"... make it any more likely that a plant will become ..."

or

"... make a plant any more likely to become..."

You CANNOT combine them to get

"...make a plant any more likely that it will become ..."

That is, if you use 'plant' as the object of 'make', then it must take the complementary infinitive 'to become'.

Is it true that "more likely" has to be followed by "to"?
Thanks in advance.

not necessarily.
for instance, you could be talking about the probability of some event. in that case, you can just say that event x is likely, but event y is even more likely. or something along those lines. in the probability construction, you can also pair "likely" with "that", as in it is more likely that x will occur.

if you're talking about what someone or something is likely to do, though, you must use "likely TO". there may be other words in the way as "noise" - for instance, bob is more likely than gary to pass the test - but "likely to" is the basis of the construction.

Hi,

2 questions:

- Usually, I see "That/What/Whoever/etc S+V+O" functions as a subject. Can "Because S+V+O" functions as a subject?

- In some OG questions, OG says that using passive voice is bad because it is unclear who does the action (in other words, an unknown agent does something). In the correct choice D, isn't it unclear what is being genetically engineered? Not passive voice is bad (for instance, when who does the thing doesn't really matter, passive voice is acceptable); but I am not sure about D tho since I though that it was important to know a human/a dog/a plant is being genetically engineered. I am not arguing the correctiveness of the answer. I just want to know the rule so that I can write down on my note.

Thanks in advance.

no.

"because" acts like "although", "while", "even though", and so on.
you can't make a subject out of "although s+v+o", nor from any of the others.


- In some OG questions, OG says that using passive voice is bad because it is unclear who does the action (in other words, an unknown agent does something). In the correct choice D, isn't it unclear what is being genetically engineered? Not passive voice is bad (for instance, when who does the thing doesn't really matter, passive voice is acceptable); but I am not sure about D tho since I though that it was important to know a human/a dog/a plant is being genetically engineered. I am not arguing the correctiveness of the answer. I just want to know the rule so that I can write down on my note.

Thanks in advance.[/quote]

you're misreading the statement about an "agent". the "agent" is whatever would follow the word by, if that word were present.

for instance:
jimmy is being photographed by the famous photographer Flash DeCube. --> Flash DeCube is the agent.

jimmy is being photographed. --> the agent (i.e., who's doing the photographing) is unknown). it's still perfectly clear that jimmy is the one being photographed, though.

here, it's perfectly clear that the plant is being genetically engineered.
we don't know the agent -- i.e., we don't know who is doing the engineering -- but, here, we simply don't care. it's totally irrelevant to the context of the sentence.

oops, I confused myself for the "unknown agent" thing.
Thanks Ron!

: )

Is this the only reason to eliminate B ? Can we take subject-pronoun-first as a valid rule ALWAYS in GMAT ?