Building On Civilizations that Preceded them in Coastal Peru, the Mochica Developed their Own Elaborate Society

Question: Building on civilizations that preceded them in coastal Peru, the Mochica developed their own elaborate society, based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting other wild and domestic resources.

(A) based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting
(B) based on the cultivation of such crops as corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and seafood, and the exploitation of
(C) and basing it on the cultivation of crops like corn and beans, harvesting fish and seafood, and the exploiting of
(D) and they based it on their cultivation of crops such as corn and beans, the harvest of fish and seafood, and exploiting
(E) and they based it on their cultivating such crops like corn and beans, their harvest of fish and shellfish, and they exploited

“Building on civilizations that preceded them in coastal Peru, the Mochica developed their own elaborate society, based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting other wild and domestic resources.” - is a GMAT sentence correction question. These types of questions contain grammatical errors in the underlined sentence and we have to choose the correct statement from the options. GMAT sentence correction is a part of GMAT verbal.

Answer: B

Explanation:

The given sentence correction question is tested by the given-below rules:

• Parallelism
• Comparison of two elements
• Modifiers

Building on civilizations that preceded them in coastal Peru, the Mochica developed their own elaborate society, based on cultivating such crops like corn and beans, the harvesting of fish and shellfish, and exploiting other wild and domestic resources.

(A) This answer choice fails to take care of parallelism among “cultivating such crops like corn and beans”, “the harvesting of fish and shellfish”, and “exploiting other wild and domestic resources”; remember, all elements in an exceedingly list must be parallel. Further, Option A incorrectly uses the unidiomatic construction “such…like” to supply samples of “corn and beans”; remember, “such as” is employed for giving examples.
(B) Correct. This answer choice correctly maintains parallelism among “the cultivation of such crops as corn and beans”, “, the harvesting of fish and seafood”, and “the exploitation of other wild and domestic resources”.
(C) This answer choice fails to keep up the parallelism between “developed their own elaborate society” and “basing it on…”; remember, any elements linked by a conjunction (“and” during this sentence) must be parallel. Further, Option C fails to keep up parallelism among “the cultivation of crops like corn and beans”, “harvesting fish and seafood”, and “the exploiting of other wild and domestic resources”
(D)Option D uses the needlessly wordy construction “and they based it on”, resulting in awkwardness and redundancy.
(E) It incorrectly uses the unidiomatic construction “such…like” to supply samples of “corn and beans”; remember, “such as” is employed for giving examples. Additionally, it uses the needlessly wordy construction “and they based it on”, resulting in awkwardness and redundancy.

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