Prep SC--insufficient consumption of nutrients

[lambandme]

Surveys have shown that in up to 40 percent of elderly people living independently in affluent countries, the consumption of one or more essential nutrients is insufficient or they have deficient levels of these nutrients in their blood.

(A) in up to 40 percent of elderly people living independently in affluent countries, the consumption of one or more essential nutrients is insufficient or they have
(B) in up to 40 percent of elderly people who live independently in affluent countries, they consume one or more essential nutrients insufficiently or have
(C) in up to 40 percent of elderly people who live independently in affluent countries, one or more essential nutrients are consumed insufficiently or having
(D) up to 40 percent of elderly people living independently in affluent countries who consume insufficient amounts of one or more essential nutrients or who have
(E) up to 40 percent of elderly people who live independently in affluent countries consume insufficient amounts of one or more essential nutrients or have

OA is E
What is wrong with B?
Is it because B is essentially saying that "In crowd A, crowd A consume nutrients insufficiently and have...."??, thus redundant.

Apart from that, does it have any more grammatically fatal errors??

[mithunsam]

In B, pronoun "they" doesn't have an antecedent to refer to... (Also "consume one or more essential nutrients insufficiently" is wordy)

E should be the correct answer

[lambandme]

In B, pronoun "they" doesn't have an antecedent to refer to... (Also "consume one or more essential nutrients insufficiently" is wordy)

E should be the correct answer

Yes, E is the OA, but I still don't know what's wrong with B because:

In B, "they" could refer to "elderly people" in "in up to 40 percent of elderly people who live independently in"

and as for "one or more essential nutrients", this structure appears in every option, so that doesn't create a split either.

[messi10]

Hi,

The sentence is trying to convey that there certain adults:

consume insufficient amounts of one or more essential nutrients
OR
have deficient levels of these nutrients in their blood.

These two parts are parallel in E as they are required to be.

Answer choices A, B and C can be be crossed out as they do not maintain this parallelism

Hope this helps

Regards

Sunil

[lambandme]

Hi,

The sentence is trying to convey that there certain adults:

consume insufficient amounts of one or more essential nutrients
OR
have deficient levels of these nutrients in their blood.

These two parts are parallel in E as they are required to be.

Answer choices A, B and C can be be crossed out as they do not maintain this parallelism

Hope this helps

Regards

Sunil

Thanks varun_783, but actually B does maintain parallelism in this case.

[messi10]

Ah yes, you are right. My apologies. However, B is still wrong because of the structure.

I am going to use answer choice B in a simplified form of the sentence:

Surveys have shown that in X% of people, they consume Y or have Z.

The two clauses separated by the comma do not make sense together. Its almost creating a run-on sentence

Regards

Sunil

[RonPurewal]

Is it because B is essentially saying that "In crowd A, crowd A consume nutrients insufficiently and have...."??, thus redundant.

yes. in fact, it's much worse than redundancy; it actually creates the nonsense meaning that people are somehow inside themselves while consuming nutrients.

[lambandme]

Is it because B is essentially saying that "In crowd A, crowd A consume nutrients insufficiently and have...."??, thus redundant.

yes. in fact, it's much worse than redundancy; it actually creates the nonsense meaning that people are somehow inside themselves while consuming nutrients.

Thanks Ron!

[RonPurewal]

Is it because B is essentially saying that "In crowd A, crowd A consume nutrients insufficiently and have...."??, thus redundant.

yes. in fact, it's much worse than redundancy; it actually creates the nonsense meaning that people are somehow inside themselves while consuming nutrients.

Thanks Ron!

sure

[saintjingjing]

en, I analyze ABCDEone by one
in fact, D IS WRONG CLEARLY,no verb in clause
C, having is wrong,
ron, am I correct?

but about AB, I am not sure.
people say in a&b, they is wrong, but I think why it can not refer to 40% elderly people?

and ron says that in b the meaning is wrong, but can anyone explain it for me, I do not understand. thanks

[RonPurewal]

and ron says that in b the meaning is wrong, but can anyone explain it for me, I do not understand. thanks

as noted in the post above -- choices a, b, c say "in these people, they consume..."
taken literally, this construction suggests that someone located inside these people is consuming nutrients.

[saintjingjing]

and ron says that in b the meaning is wrong, but can anyone explain it for me, I do not understand. thanks

as noted in the post above -- choices a, b, c say "in these people, they consume..."
taken literally, this construction suggests that someone located inside these people is consuming nutrients.

thanks ron.
oh, I think I understand, in up to 40%, they--> some people in 40% people
but correct one express 40% people do...
right?

[RonPurewal]

thanks ron.
oh, I think I understand, in up to 40%, they--> some people in 40% people
but correct one express 40% people do...
right?

i still can't really tell from your syntax -- i think you may have the concept right now, but i'm not 100% sure -- so here's another example:
In a person with Graves disease, the thyroid gland produces an excess of hormones.
--> this sentence is correct, because it actually describes what is going on *in* a person with Graves disease.

the corresponding example in this problem is incorrect, because it does not describe what is going on inside the people in question.

[namnam123]

There are 2 things we need to learn from a verbal problem-what are the errors and mode to attack a kind of problem. The first thing is done naturally already, the second not done properly.

In this seemingly simple question, gmat test us an important skill-reading many answer choices to get the intent of sentence before finding error. This skill is needed when the choice A is a so distorted meaning that no one can understand A. When not understanding A, test taker reread the choice A and die because he looses time.

read many answer choices to avoid this trap which is most fatal for non native speakers with the less developed reading skill.

[RonPurewal]

This skill is needed when the choice A is a so distorted meaning that no one can understand A.

this should never happen.

in every official sentence prompt that i have ever seen -- no matter how badly written -- the intended meaning has been immediately clear.
it is true that the prompt sentences contain many different errors of many different types (remember, 80% of them are wrong!), but you should always be able to figure out exactly what they are intended to say.

if you don't grasp the meaning of a sentence, you are probably thinking way too much in terms of grammatical analysis. in this case, back off the formal analysis, and use your normal common sense to think about the situation in the sentence; if you do, you should the able to interpret it correctly.