Question
Many house builders offer rent-to-buy programs that enable a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to be able to move into new housing and to apply part of the rent to a purchase later.
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
Many house builders offer rent-to-buy programs.
- These programs enable
- a kind of family (What kind? The family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment)
- to move into new housing
- and to apply part of the rent to a purchase later
- a kind of family (What kind? The family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment)
This is what the sentence intends to say. Everything’s fine with the sentence except it uses ‘enable’ and ‘to be able’ together. Either you say:
- XYZ enables ABC to do these things
- Or you say, XYZ makes ABC able to do these things
You don’t say “XYZ enables ABC to be able to do these things”. The use is entirely redundant and makes the sentence look non-standard. (It also makes the author look like a case of short term memory loss! The author just seems to have forgotten that he had already written ‘enables’)
Option Analysis
(A) Incorrect. For the redundancy error explained above.
(B) Correct. Removed the error in the original sentence without changing anything else.
(C) Incorrect. For the following reasons:
- The use of semi-colon after “programs” is incorrect. The semi-colon indicates the beginning of a new clause. However, there is no independent clause after semi-colon; rather, we have a relative clause referring back to “programs”.
- Singular verb “enables” doesn’t agree with plural subject “programs”.
- “to apply” and “to move” are the only two elements in a list, and thus need to be connected by “and”, not by a “comma”.
(D) Incorrect. For the following reasons:
- Singular verb “enables” doesn’t agree with plural subject “programs”.
- The use of verb-ing modifier “applying” is incorrect. It doesn’t provide any additional information about the preceding clause. We know from the context that this part should be turned into an infinitive “to apply” since the idea is parallel to “to move into new housing”.
(E) Incorrect. For the following reasons:
- Redundancy error of the original sentence
- Error no. 2 of option D
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Hi Cj,
Question regarding option D. ( SV error corrected)
Many house builders offer rent-to-buy programs programs, which enable a family with insufficient savings for a conventional down payment to move into new housing, applying part of the rent to a purchase later.
Doubt about the usage of “verb+ing” here.
Since programs enable a family to move into new house -> this action helps family in applying part of the rent to a purchase later. So Verb + ing now provides additional information about preceding clause or modify preceding clause and also make sense with the subject of the clause – Programs – they enable families to apply part of the rent to purchase later – Is this correct understanding ?
can we use Verb+ing to provide extra information about the last clause action in above case?
Thanks
Cheers
AC
Hi Amit,
The verb-ing (applying) doesn’t make sense with the subject (programs) since programs are not applying part of the rent. The programs enable families to apply part of the rent…
– CJ
Hi CJ,
So verb-ing doesn’t always have to make sense with subject. So i feel in this context verb-ing makes sense with the preceding clause (which has the verb ‘enable’).
Is my understanding correct ?
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