SC: Forum Q

[Samy]

Source: Scoretop Forum Q. Please help.

For the farmer who takes care to keep them cool, providing them with high energy feed and milking them regularly,Holstein cows are producing an average of 2275 gallons of milk each year.

A. providing them with high energy feed and milking them regularly, Holstein cows are producing
B. providing them with high energy feed ,and milked regularly, the Holstein cow produces
C. provided with high energy feed, and milking them regularly, Holstein cows are producing
D. provided with high energy feed ,and milked regularly, the Holstein cow produces
E. provided with high energy feed ,and milked regularly, the Holstein cows will produce

There is a Subject Verb issue, a Parallelism issue etc. Cant get hold of the right ans and technique for this prob.

[StaceyKoprince]

This is from an old paper-based GMAT and one of those tough ones in which nothing really sounds right.

So, A should say "providing them with high energy feed, and milking them regularly, Holstein cows are producing " This makes a list out of "to keep," "providing," and "milking" which is a list, but it fails the parallelism test. Also, the verb tense "are producing" is wrong - if the farmer takes care of them, they will respond a certain way. Eliminate A. (Note that I added a comma missing from the original text, above.)

B also has parallelism issues (providing, milked), as does C (provided and milking). D and E have parallelism with provided and milked, but they still don't match "to keep." And this is where this one gets really hard. Most people will want to keep this as a list of three things, with those three words properly parallel - and that would be a good way to write the sentence, but they haven't given us that option.

If we lopped off that opening clause, we'd have "Provided with high energy feed, and milked regularly, Holstein cows..." That's okay. Then they add this separate clause out front (the "For the farmer" bit) and this is what makes it sound bad b/c we want to combine that opening clause with the provided and milked piece. Since we don't have that as an option, we're forced to look at them as separate items (though we do still want parallelism between provided and milked).

Then, we're just left with "produces" vs. "will produce" since D and E both use provided and milked. The sentence begins "For the farmer who takes care to keep THEM cool" so we have to use plural for the cows. Answer D uses singular, so E is the answer.

Definitely not a fun problem.

[Samy]

Yes that was indeed an OLD PAPER based GMAT ETS Q.

So if ever we are stuck, can we ignore one of the principles (in this case parallelism) to arrive at a possible ans ?
Also I think "will" in E could be a strong enough reason for choosing E.

Thanks a lot for your detailed ans.
I realize it was not fun answering that Q, but I too was stuck.

[StaceyKoprince]

We're not technically ignoring parallelism - this is one of those weird instances in which they write the sentence to make us think it should have parallelism between the opening bit and the rest, but they're just trying to fool us. It's not required to make this a list of three things (with the attendant parallelism).

It's also the kind of sentence that nobody would write in the real world - they're just trying to get us to make a mistake.

[lawrencewwh]

I have a question,
Why not D?

D. provided with high-energy feed, and milked regularly, the Holstein cow produces
-------------------------------
Because in the original sentence,
For the farmer who takes care to keep them cool, providing them with high-energy feed, and milking them regularly, Holstein cows are producing an average of 2,275 gallons of milk each per year.

"each" indicates that the subject should be singular,
So in D, the Holstein cow produces meets the use of each

[esledge]

I have a question,
Why not D?

D. provided with high-energy feed, and milked regularly, the Holstein cow produces
-------------------------------
Because in the original sentence,
For the farmer who takes care to keep them cool, providing them with high-energy feed, and milking them regularly, Holstein cows are producing an average of 2,275 gallons of milk each per year.

"each" indicates that the subject should be singular,
So in D, the Holstein cow produces meets the use of each

Watch out! The original didn't say each per year, meaning each cow per year. It said each year, meaning that in a given year, the average for all the cows is 2275. Plus, we are stuck with "them," which refers to cows, so even if the subject and verb agree, we must chose a plural subject.

We have actually banned Scoretop questions on our forum since this was originally posted, so I am going to lock this thread to prevent future discussion. There are better practice questions out there. I wouldn't waste any more time on what appears to be a problematic sentence.