Question

Normally a bone becomes fossilized through the action of groundwater, which permeates the bone, washes away its organic components, and replaces them with minerals.

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

  • Normally a bone becomes fossilized (Main Subject: A bone; Main Verb: becomes)
    • through the action of groundwater, (Prepositional phrase modifying the main verb)
      • which permeates the bone, washes away its organic components, and replaces them with minerals. (Dependent clause modifying ‘groundwater’ – Subject: which; Verb: permeates, washes, and replaces)

The sentence says that generally, a bone becomes fossilized through the action of groundwater. The groundwater does three things: permeates the bone, washes away its organic components, and replaces the organic components with minerals.

The sentence is correct as is.

Option Analysis

(A) Correct.

(B) Incorrect. This option has a deterministic parallelism error. The three elements in the list are:

  1. which permeates the bone
  2. which washes away its organic components
  3. which those are replaced with minerals

Since the third element is incorrect grammatically and logically (doesn’t make sense), the list is incorrect.

(C) Incorrect. The main error with this option is ‘to be replaced’. ‘to be replaced’ denotes the purpose of the verb ‘permeates’, leading to the meaning that groundwater permeates the bone with a purpose to be replaced with minerals.

‘washing away…components’ can be treated as a ‘comma+verb-ing’ modifier for the clause ‘which permeates’. ‘washing away its organic components’ could be a direct consequence of ‘permeating’, so this construction is not incorrect.

(D) Incorrect. For the following reasons:

  1. ‘to be replaced’ denotes the purpose of the verb ‘becomes’, leading to the meaning that the bone become fossilized with a purpose to be replaced with minerals.
  2. Logically, ‘permeating’ and ‘washing’ make sense with ‘groundwater’. However, in a ‘comma+verb-ing’ structure, the verb-ing doesn’t go with anything other than the subject.

(E) Incorrect. For the following reasons:

  1. 2nd error of option D
  2. A comma is missing before ‘and’. Since the list contains three elements, we need to have a comma before ‘and’.

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.