Question
The newspaper story accurately recounted the history of the colonial mansion, that it contained thirteen rooms, and that it had a reputation for being a haunted house.
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
- The newspaper story accurately recounted (Main Clause – Subject: “story”; Verb: “recounted”)
- the history (Object for the verb “recounted”)
- of the colonial mansion, (Prepositional Phrase – modifies “the history”)
- that it contained thirteen rooms, (Dependent clause acting as an object for the verb “recounted”)
- and that it had a reputation (Dependent clause acting as an object for the verb “recounted”)
- for being a haunted house. (Prepositional Phrase – modifies “reputation”)
- the history (Object for the verb “recounted”)
The sentence says that the newspaper story accurately recounted three things:
- The history of the mansion
- The fact that the mansion contained thirteen rooms
- The fact that the mansion had a reputation for being haunted.
There are two problems with the sentence:
- The two “that” clauses are not parallel to the noun “history”.
- “Mansion had a reputation for being a haunted house” can be more concisely written as “mansion had a reputation for being haunted”.
Option Analysis
(A) Incorrect. For the reasons mentioned above.
(B) Incorrect. Repeats the first problem of option A.
(C) Incorrect. The sentence lacks parallelism. There are two lists in the sentence now: one containing two elements: “history of the colonial mansion” and “that the mansion contained thirteen rooms” and the other containing the two verbs “recounted” and “said”. In the first list, “history” and the “that” clause need to be joined by “and”. Besides, even if they are joined by “and”, the list will still be wrong since they are not parallel.
(D) Incorrect. Since there is no “and” before “said”, in this option, there is a list of three verbs “recounted”, “said”, and “had”. The subject for verbs is “the newspaper story”. With the last verb “had”, the sentence means that the newspaper story had a reputation for being a haunted house. Clearly, a non-sense meaning.
(E) Correct. There are two lists in the sentence now:
- The first one containing the verbs “recounted” and “said”
- The second one containing the verbs “contained” and “had”
Please note that all the options in this question contain the word ‘being’, again destroying the extremely baseless myth that options with the word “being” are incorrect.
If you have any doubts regarding any part of this solution, please feel free to ask in the comments section.
This solution was created by Chiranjeev Singh and Anish Passi.
HI CJ, I don’t understand why ‘that’ is acting as an object for the verb ‘recount’. Could you please explain? Thanks!
Not just ‘that’ but the entire ‘that’ clause is acting as an object of the verb ‘recount’. The story recounted something – the ‘that’ clause is standing for ‘something’. As you can probably see, ‘something’ is the object for the verb ‘recounted’.
What about the pronoun ambiguity of “It” – that was the key for my decision making.
Yes, “it” is an issue to some extent since it’s the subject of the dependent clause and thus should ideally refer to the subject of the clause before it. However, since logically, it’s very clear that “it” refers to the mansion, I haven’t mentioned it as an issue.
can we say that+ clause after history is modifying history.
history of mansion that it contained 13 room
Sir,
In option A. The sentence is coming as The NS accurately recounted that it contained…
Since this does not make sense. So we eliminated option A.
Why does it not make sense?
Sir,
Please evaluate my reasoning in Option c:-
There is a parallelism issue.
The NS accurately recounted the history….
The NS accurately recounted that the mansion contained Thirteen rooms…
The NS accurately said…
So as you can see the parallelism is incorrect. Is my reasoning correct?
How is parallelism incorrect here?
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