Participle vs Gerund

[RaffaeleM39]

Hi,
I made a OG Verbal Review exercise which made a point I think I missed in the Manhattan GMAT SC book.
Since I can't post OG questions here, let's make my own phrase!

The phrase is:

Microsoft has made various softwares aimed at helping students and improving their understanding of the subject.

This would be deemed as correct.

Now the incorrect one:

Microsoft has made various softwares aimed at the helping of students and improving their understanding of the subject.

And the explanation would be that "the" creates a gerund, which is not parallel to the participle "improving".

Can you explain this, please?

I understand a gerund is a noun and a participle is a verb ... how can we assess if the -ing form is used as a gerund or if it is used as a participle?

I don't think that having "the" before is sufficient. For example:

Eating apples is healthy

In this phrase "eating" is used as a gerund, right? But there is no "the" before.

Thank you very much

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Before I go into attempting any grammatical terms, please note that it's not essential to know many definitions to do well at GMAT. In any case, grammar is descriptive of language and there are lots of debates between grammarians over some of the finer points. What is important is to reflect on the use of language (one's own as well as that of GMAT problems), understand the way words work, and pay attention to nuances of meaning.

Think of the word 'swimming', and the various uses it has:

1. Swimming is a good way to get fit.
2. Swimming in the sea, she caught a cold.
3. We watched the fish swimming in the sea.
4. There are several type of swimming cats.

You can actually understand everything you need to know about the word 'swimming' in these various contexts without using any grammatical words. Sentence 1 talks about swimming as an activity; sentence 2 describes an action that caused her to get sick; in sentence 3, 'swimming' gives some information about the fish we watched; and in sentence 4 'swimming' describes cats as words such as 'big' or 'dangerous' do. Knowing that 'swimming' in sentence 1 is a gerund and in sentence 2 is a participle might help, but it's not essential. Actually, I couldn't be completely confident of the grammatical terms for 3 and 4: I'd think of 3 as an '-ing modifier' and 4 as an adjective.

So, in answer to your questions, I'd encourage you to think of 'aimed at' as a phrase that can be followed by an '-ing' word. That's just an idiom, much like we say 'He's good at swimming.' As for this sentence - "Microsoft has made various softwares aimed at the helping of students and improving their understanding of the subject." - you can see that it's not parallel ('the helping of students' and 'improving their understanding'). As far as I know, 'helping' is a gerund in both the examples you give as the word is acting as a noun in both cases.

"Eating apples is healthy." is a good example of a gerund. Here, the word 'eating' is the subject of the sentence and it doesn't need 'the' before it. In fact, most examples of gerund I can think of don't have 'the'. What defines a gerund is that the word is acting as a noun, either as a subject or as an object. You can see that in the examples I gave above, in sentences 2, 3, and 4 the -ing word is acting as a modifier rather than a noun. That level of understanding is sufficient to do really well on GMAT.