Spain’s Governing Coalition has Come Under Strain as it pushes GMAT Sentence Correction

Question: Spain’s governing coalition has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures, and it must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August, which will push forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.

1. Spain’s governing coalition has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures, and it must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August, which will push forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.
2. Spain’s governing coalition, coming under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures, must now enforce agreed-upon measures and lay off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August, pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.
3. Spain’s governing coalition, which has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures, must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August and pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.
4. Spain’s governing coalition, which has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures and must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August and pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.
5. Spain’s governing coalition has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures; it must now enforce agreed-upon measures, and lay off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August, pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.

Correct Answer: C
Explanation: Spain’s governing coalition has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures. It must now enforce agreed-upon measures. By laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August and pushing forward a stalled project to privatise state assets

Spain’s governing coalition, which has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures, must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August and pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.- Correct. Spain's government coalition must now enforce agreed upon measures. Perfect parallelism. No other errors. Participants clearly modify the preceding clause. Here "which" correctly refers to Spain’s governing coalition. Moreover, laying off 4,000 civil servants and pushing forward a stalled project are parallel in structure. And this choice is the intended meaning of the sentence.

This choice has a coherent and logical structure. “The coalition, which has been facing this, must now enforce measures, laying off these people and pushing forward this project” The “which” clause in the middle is properly used to modify the coalition and the two “-ing” phrases at the end are parallel and properly modify the coalition and how it must enforce the measures. Let’s examine the other available options.

Option A
Spain’s governing coalition has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures, and it must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August, which will push forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.- Incorrect. Modifier error. “Which” should always be followed by a comma and should refer to the noun before the comma. Here "which" is incorrectly referring to August. Further the meaning is distorted since pushing forward to privatise is part of "agreed upon measures"

Option B
Spain’s governing coalition, coming under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures, must now enforce agreed-upon measures and lay off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August, pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.- Incorrect. Even though this is grammatically correct, it changes the intended meaning. The phrase “pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets” cannot be logically linked to the verb clause “lay off 4,000 civil servants.” Laying off 4,000 civil servants has nothing to do with pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets. Those must be two separate modifying phrases relating to how the coalition must enforce the measures.

Option D
Spain’s governing coalition, which has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures and must now enforce agreed-upon measures, laying off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August and pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.- Incorrect. The subject “Spain’s governing coalition” has no verb to follow it anywhere in the sentence.

Option E
Spain’s governing coalition has come under strain as it pushes its painful austerity measures; it must now enforce agreed-upon measures, and lay off 4,000 civil servants by the end of August, pushing forward a stalled project to privatize state assets.- Incorrect. Suffers from the same flaw as (B) and the semicolon disconnects two things that should be linked in one sentence. The parallel actions are laying off and pushing forward and not "enforce" and "lay off". "lay off" and "pushing forward" are in fact the measures that must be enforced. Meaning distortion due to usage of parallelism marker "and" prior to "lay off". The participle "pushing forward" can't be the result of laying off 4000 servants.

“Spain’s governing coalition has come under strain as it”- is a GMAT sentence correction question. These sorts of questions come up with grammatical errors in the underlined part of the sentence. The candidates need to select the correct statement given in the options. The GMAT sentence correction section demands good skills in grammar since the candidate has to identify common grammatical errors. GMAT sentence correction is a part of GMAT verbal.

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