Q. At only four-feet-eight-inches and ninety-four pounds, a small frame necessary for a gymnast, Mary Lou Retton captured the hearts of the American people and won a gold medal in the 1984 Olympic Games.
a.) a small frame being necessary for a gymnast
b.) having a small frame necessary for a gymnast
c.) being small-framed necessarily for gymnastics
d.) a small frame necessary for gymnastics
e.) because her small frame is necessarily for gymnastics
I was left with options B and D. It turned out that the correct answer is D. I do not understand why. Please do give explanations for your answers.
Thank you,
All help is appreciated.
“A small frame necessary for gymnastics” describes the dependent clause before it. I think ‘B’ is incorrect because there’s no subject that “having” can refer to in the preceding clause. Btw you usually want to avoid answer choices with words like “having” and “being”.
Is this an official question? And is answer A supposed to match the original sentence, as usual? Because it doesn’t.
@JuicyMango - “At only four-feet-eight-inches and ninety-four pounds” is not a “dependent clause.” It has no verb. Instead, it functions as a modifier here, and it can’t modify the gerund “having,” so (B) is wrong.
And yeah, I had the same Q @bodangles asks–what kind of nonsense Q is this? Is there some third party test maker out there that doesn’t even know the basic format of sentence-improvement questions?
@marvin100 Sorry, I probably shouldn’t answer grammar questions because my best writing score is only a 750 lol. Thank you for the insight :).
D is wrong because it makes “Mary Lou Retton” appositive to “frame,” which makes no sense. In fact the only one that does make sense is A, since the absolute construction effectively isolates the phrase from the rest of the sentence. But it’s icky. All of them are icky. The ideas don’t really fit together.
Not at all, @JuicyMango - 750 is huge, first of all, and second–and most importantly–everyone slips up from time to time. No shame in that!