12.20 TN第23套前六题 正确率50% Among lower-paid workers, union members are less likely than nonunion members to be enrolled in lower-end insurance plans imposing stricter limits on medical services and requiring doctors to see more patients, and spend less time with each. (A) imposing stricter limits on medical services and requiring doctors to see more patients, and spend (B) imposing stricter limits on medical services, requiring doctors to see more patients, and spending (C) that impose stricter limits on medical services,require doctors to see more patients, and spend (D) that impose stricter limits on medical services and require doctors to see more patients, spending (E) that impose stricter limits on medical services, requiring doctors to see more patients and spending 正确答案是D,我选了E choice a: 'spend' is ungrammatical here (it has no logical subject, and isn't parallel to anything).
choice b: imposing, requiring, and spending are all parallel, implying that the insurance plans do all three of these things (an absurdity荒谬 in the last case).
choice c: all three verbs are parallel again, leading to the same absurdity witnessed in choice b.
choice d (= correct): the parallelism follows the model outlined above: only the verbs that are logically parallel appear in parallel structure.
in choice d, you could legitimately make a case that 'spending' could modify the entire huge clause about what insurance plans do, and is therefore ambiguous. however, that's the OA, so you've learned that this problem is ok in the eyes of the gmat people. if there's a rule that can be articulated here, it's probably something along the lines of 'participial modifier applies to nearest action'.
choice e: 'requiring' and 'spending' are parallel in the modifier, implying that the plans themselves spend time with patients (in addition to requiring blah blah blah). this doesn't make sense. in choice e, parallelism dictates that requiring and spending refer to the same subject, which must be insurance plans. (you can't say doing X and doing Y if X and Y are done by different agents.)
you have to realize which verbs are supposed to be parallel and which aren't. there's no grammatical formula for this; you have to examine the meaning of the sentence to figure it out.
- 'impose' (in whatever form) should be parallel to 'require' (again, in whatever form). these are two different things, both of which are aspects of the plan (= logical parallelism).
- 'spend' should not be parallel to 'see', because it functions as a modifier of 'see' (it's a descriptive adverb modifier, detailing the way in which the doctors see the patients). "spending" is adverbial. It doesn't modify "doctors" or any other noun.
针对D 的专门分析 Among lower-paid workers, union members are less likely than nonunion members to be enrolled in lower-end insurance plans [that impose stricter limits on medical services and require doctors [to see more patients]], spending... in this case, the COMMA -ING modifier could grammatically modify either the blue clause or the purple clause (which is nested within the blue one). from context, it should be clear that the modifier is meant to modify the purple clause. (this is normally what happens in this type of situation with nested clauses: an attached COMMA -ING modifier will normally modify the embedded, smaller clause. there is no need to memorize the statistical rule for this, however -- in most cases, such as this one, the context will make quite clear what is being modified and what is not.) the COMMA -ING modifier modifies the action of the purple clause, and also applies to the subject of the purple clause -- namely, the relative pronoun "that". this relative pronoun, in turn, refers to "lower-end insurance plans". so the rule still works. Because she knew many of the leaders of colonial America and the American Revolution personally, Mercy Otis Warren was continually at or near the center of political events from 1765 to 1789, a vantage point combining with her talent for writing to make her one of the most valuable historians of the era (A) same as above (B) a vantage point, when combined with her talent for writing, that made (C) a vantage point that combined with her talent for writing, and it made (D) and this vantage point, which combined with her talent for writing to make (E) and this vantage point, combined with her talent for writing, made A."ing" modifiers are active forms. in other words, if properly used, they should have a meaning equivalent to that of an active-voice verb whose subject is the noun in question.
so, if you are going to write "a vantage point combining...", that's equivalent to saying that "the vantage point combined..." -- in other words, suggesting a literal act of combining, as in a chemical reaction or something along those lines. C it stands for a vantage point. that doesn't really make sense in context, so that's one reason to eliminate this choice. 这道题的难点 the problem that "combined" appears as an active verb in that choice -- suggesting that this vantage point actively "combined" with the author's writing talent (as in some sort of chemical reaction, or something). with that setup, you would also have "... that combined with her talent for writing" as a standalone clause, with only non-essential modifiers -- implying that you could get rid of those modifiers and just say "this vantage point combined with her talent for writing" by itself. that also doesn't make sense; the whole "combined" thing doesn't make any sense without a reference to the result.
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