GWD-3-Q4: 请帮我解释一下为何选B呢？谢谢

sv2000

GWD-3-Q4:  

Yellow jackets number among the 900 or so species of the world’s social wasps, wasps living in a highly cooperative and organized society where they consist almost entirely of females—the queen and her sterile female workers.

wasps living in a highly cooperative and organized society where they consist almost entirely of

wasps that live in a highly cooperative and organized society consisting almost entirely of

which means they live in a highly cooperative and organized society, almost all

which means that their society is highly cooperative, organized, and it is almost entirely

living in a society that is highly cooperative, organized, and it consists of almost all

lilyzy

B. consisting修饰society.

A 错. they指代wasps.

C和D, which means没有合理解释对象.

E, it 指代不清. 意思错. living应该指wasps而不是yellow jacket.

mildsevens

选对了，但是对后面这个分句的成分有点疑惑，如果是同位语的话,重复wasps不是很别扭吗?

wobanda

如果是同位语的话,重复wasps不是很别扭吗?

yangflyfree

social wasps和wasps that live in a highly cooperative and organized society consisting almost entirely of females—the queen and her sterile female workers.是同位语

crane1214

同意楼上，同位语关系。

MBA1982

A 错. they指代wasps.

-------------------这个解释很简单，但是满正确的啊！

excellor

I found this from Manattan GMAT forum:

choice b features a rather strange-looking usage of a very common construction: the use of an appositive phrase (a noun phrase with no introductory words) to define a term, in this case 'social wasps'.

here's an example:
seamen distinguish flotsam, goods floating on seawater after a shipwreck from jetsam, goods thrown overboard by the crew of a ship.
you've probably seen this construction many times. it's weird-looking in this problem, though, because of the apparent repetition of 'wasps'.

but here's the story: the term being defined is 'social wasps'.
            
therefore, there's actually no redundancy: you need to think about 'wasps' and 'social wasps' as two completely different words. once you think about it that way, the sentence is just like the flotsam/jetsam example above, which should be noncontroversial.