Zoo's Lions

[winson.j.liu]

If the original sentence stated "Rather than confining an animal to cages, the zoo's lion currently lives...." which shows that both are singular, then how would an appropriate answer look?

If option C was modified to say "the zoo is currently housing a lion in an environment that it specially designed to mimic its natural habitat", that would be incorrect of course because the antecedent isn't clear for it or its. I'm guessing the correct answer would word it differently so that the words "zoo" and "lion" aren't repeated.

I assume even if one of the "it" was removed, it still wouldn't be correct. For example, "the zoo is currently housing a lion in an environment that it specially designed to mimic the animal's natural habitat."

[tim]

i don't know what you mean by "how would an appropriate answer look?" can you please clarify?

correct about the pronoun problem in your modified version of C

i'm not sure i see what's wrong with your final example. can you tell us what you think is wrong about it?

[winson.j.liu]

When I said how would an appropriate answer look, I was asking a hypothetical, maybe a correctly answer choice you can come up with to display how to make the pronouns work or to make the sentence correct if both the zoo and the lion were singular.

As for the last example, I wasn't completely sure what makes it right or wrong. Can you explain how it's right? The explanation I can come up with is that since the word "animal" is stated in the latter part of the sentence, it logically leaves the "it" to refer to the subject (zoo). For whatever reason, I'm not convinced that is the correct explanation.

[tim]

your post indicates two fundamental flaws in your approach to SC that you should try to fix if you want to really excel at these problems:

first, you should not be trying to fix any wrong answer choices or come up with hypotheticals that will be correct. sentence correction is not about fixing anything (despite the name); it's all about finding four wrong answers..

second, you should never ask why something is right. again, sentence correction is not about figuring out what's right; it's all about finding four wrong answers..

[winson.j.liu]

if i don't ask why something looks right, then how would i or anyone learn? it arbitrarily looks right to me, which is not how you get a firm grasp of anything. your statement is contradictory. if you don't know if and why something is right, then how would you know which 4 are actually wrong?

[jnelson0612]

if i don't ask why something looks right, then how would i or anyone learn? it arbitrarily looks right to me, which is not how you get a firm grasp of anything. your statement is contradictory. if you don't know if and why something is right, then how would you know which 4 are actually wrong?

Hi Winson,
Just to give you my perspective on what Tim is saying, there are so, so many constructions that could be in correct answers. That's why it's so hard to focus in on learning everything that can be right. You just can't.

However, if you can learn a finite number of grammar rules, you can quickly identify when those rules are being violated. If I see bad parallelism or subject-verb diagreement I know that answer choice is out. I keep looking for mistakes until I get the answer down to one choice, then just choose that and go on. If I know that I have four wrong answers I feel confident in my choice. On the GMAT Verbal section, the correct answer won't necessarily be "right"; people often pick apart correct answers and say "well, I would write the sentence that way". The GMAT is such a difficult test that you don't want to spend any time trying to find the "right" answer; just know the correct answer will be the one that is "not wrong". Process of elimination is the name of the game!

I hope that this helps. :-)