Question
Covering 71 percent of Earth’s surface, the oceans play an essential role in maintaining the conditions for human existence on land, moderating temperature by the absorption of heat and carbon dioxide, and giving pure water back to the atmosphere through evaporation
Option A
Option B
Option C
Option D
Option E
(This question is from Official Guide. Therefore, because of copyrights, the complete question cannot be copied here. The question can be accessed at GMAT Club)
Solution
Sentence Analysis
Let’s understand the structure of the sentence:
- Covering 71 percent of Earth’s surface,
- the oceans play an essential role in
- maintaining the conditions for human existence on land,
- moderating temperature by the absorption of heat and carbon dioxide,
- and giving pure water back to the atmosphere through evaporation
The sentence starts with a verb-ing modifier modifying “the oceans”. The oceans cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface. They play an essential role in doing three things as given above.
The meaning of the sentence is clear and logical. All the elements are in the list are parallel (verb-ing forms – maintaining, moderating, and giving)
The original sentence, thus, has no errors.
Option Analysis
(A) Correct.
(B) Incorrect. With the sentence structure in this option, there is nothing parallel to “giving pure water” before ‘and’ (in the non-underlined part).
(C) Incorrect. In this option, “by moderating” and “giving pure water” are not parallel to each other and to any other thing in the sentence.
(D) Incorrect. With the sentence structure in this option, there is nothing parallel to “giving pure water” before ‘and’ (in the non-underlined part).
(E) Incorrect. With the sentence structure in this option, there is nothing parallel to “giving pure water” before ‘and’ (in the non-underlined part).
This question highlights the importance of reading the non-underlined part. In three out of the four incorrect options, one needs to have read the non-underlined part to understand the error. The process that I recommend starts with understanding the meaning of the sentence for which you have to read the entire sentence, including the non-underlined part.
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Apart from the grammar don’t you think there is a meaning error in option (E)
“The oceans cover 71 percent of Earth’s surface, playing an essential role…”
Here the “verb-ing modifier” seems to modify the clause “the oceans cover 71%” and this doesn’t seem logical.
Neither does it present a description nor the how aspect of the clause
Let’s look at this sentence:
By covering a large part of Earth’s surface, oceans play an essential role in maintaining the conditions for human existence on land.
Does this sentence look non-sensical to you?
No. This sentence seems completely logical
If this sentence is fine, then the sentence in option E should be as well. The main clause says that the oceans cover a large part of Earth’s surface, and the verb-ing modifier presents a consequence of that.
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