Rather than accept the conventional wisdom that the earth

[sukriti.bahl]

Hi,

Could someone please help me understand how is "Rather than accept" parallel to "sailed west to see".
If I take an example - Rather than living life to the fullest, he sleeps most of the times. So here living is parallel to sleeps. Living could also be parallel if instead of sleeps we use slept. I am getting confused in the tenses one is supposed to use while checking parallelism.

Also, I wanted to know another thing - the usage of "whether " and "if". Why is "if "wrong here?

Thanks,
Suk

[tim]

Tense is never an issue in parallelism. As long as you have two conjugated verbs, they are parallel, regardless of the tense.

As for the "if" question, the only acceptable use of "if" I've seen on the GMAT is where you have a structure like "if X, [then] Y", where X and Y are both independent clauses and the "then" is optional.

[sukriti.bahl]

Thanks so much Tim :-)

[tim]

My pleasure!

[Babulu]

Hello instructors,

I have a question about [COMMA+having been] structure in the correct answer. Since 'having been sent' means the action of 'been sent' happened before 'sailed', whereas COMMA+VERBing should mean the VERBing happens at the same time as the verb - sailed - in the main clause, so isn't it a conflict?

Thanks,
Lu

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

You're right to identify this as a modifier, and right that 'having been sent' is the participle in the modifier. However, don't confuse this with a simple VERBing, here the action is clearly 'sent'. So the structure is one of a past participle modifier, more like this example:
The zebra ran away, chased by lions.
Here, the participle 'frightened' shows that the action is being done to the zebra, that it's passive voice (compare that to 'chasing lions').
Further, we can use the words 'having been' shows that the action in the modifier happened before the action in the main clause.
The zebra ran away, having been injured by lions.
In conclusion, there's no contradiction here: we can use different kinds of participle modifiers to show different relationships. Be careful of taking one rule and applying it rigidly to lots of different cases.