Question
Last week local shrimpers held a news conference to take some credit for the resurgence of the rare Kemp’s ridley turtle, saying that their compliance with laws requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets protect adult sea turtles.
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
The sentence says that local shrimpers held a news conference last week. They did so to take credit for the revival of some turtle species. In the news conference, they said something. What did they say?
Let’s focus on the part after “saying that” i.e.
- their compliance with laws requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets protect adult sea turtles.
Here, “requiring” is a verb-ing modifier modifying the previous noun “laws”. So, “requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets” is a modifier modifying laws. The sentence is, therefore, essentially:
- their compliance with laws protect adult sea turtles.
We can see that we have a SV agreement error here: subject “compliance” is singular, and verb “protect” is plural.
There is no other error in the original sentence. The verb-ing modifier “requiring that turtle-excluder devices be on shrimp nets” is correct; it follows subjunctive verb format after requiring. The usage is correct.
Option Analysis
(A) Incorrect. This option has SV agreement error, as explained above.
(B) Correct. This option uses singular verb “is protecting” for the singular noun “compliance”. This option also writes the “requiring” modifier in another correct away.
(C) Incorrect. This option has the same SV error as option A has.
(D) Incorrect. This option has SV agreement error – uses plural verb “are protecting” for singular subject “compliance”. In addition, the use of infinitive “to require” to modify laws is incorrect; we need either “that require” or “requiring”.
(E) Incorrect. This option has same “to require” error as option D has.
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Sir, in option (C) can you please elaborate on why protect can’t be a verb for that?
We already have a verb “require” for that.
Hello Sir,
While replying to a query (in the comment section) in one of the questions before, you had commented that- “A comma+verb-ing at the end of a clause never modifies the preceding noun.”
However, here you have said that – “requiring” is a verb-ing modifier modifying the previous noun “laws”.
Is this because of the absence of the comma before verb-ing modifier “requiring”? Or am I missing anything else here?
If there is no comma before a verb-ing, it acts as a typical noun modifier – it modifies the preceding noun. In this case, there is no comma.
In addition, in options A and B, “requiring” doesn’t appear at the end of a clause. Pay attention to the structure. The “that” clause has just started and before “requiring”, we just have the subject, a noun. Thus, in this case, the verb-ing is not even appearing at the end of a clause.
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