求助GWD一道讨论的比较少语法题。奶牛和农夫

cician

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.

	providing them with high-energy feed, and milking them regularly, Holstein cows are producing
	providing them with high-energy feed, and milked regularly, the Holstein cow produces
	provided with high-energy feed, and milking them regularly, Holstein cows are producing
	provided with high-energy feed, and milked regularly, the Holstein cow produces
	provided with high-energy feed, and milked regularly, Holstein cows will produce

答案是E。楼主选的A。
如果是E，cows前边的前置修饰成分不是太长了一点？读了那么久还没有看到主语cows，楼主觉得很诡异，所以把CDE都排除了。
求牛牛指点

云游

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.

cician

云游 发表于 2013-10-13 22:28
This is from an old paper-based GMAT and one of those tough ones in which nothing really sounds righ ...

Thanks! You helped a lot