<p>I need some explanations please :(</p>
<p>1) In 1988 a Soviet icebreaking ship (helped free) three gray ways that (had become trapped) in the Arctic ice after they (had swam) into the coastal waters of Alaska (to feed).</p>
<p>2) The Bactrian camel (is) well adapted to the extreme climate of its native Mongolia, (having) thick fur and underwool that (keeps) it warm in winter (and also) insulate against summer heat</p>
<p>Why are both answers C?</p>
<p>(1) it should be “had swum.” </p>
<p>(2) it should be “keep.” This one is hard, but think of it this way: the thick fur and underwool insulate against summer heat. In other words, THEY insulate. To be parallel, “the thick fur and underwool” must also be the subject of the verb keep/keeps. We would say “they keep,” so that is the right choice.</p>
<p>Isn’t the “having” ambiguous in the second question?</p>
<p>^ No, because logically we know what it modifies. A present participle is dangling and ambiguous ONLY if you logically can’t figure out what it modifies based on the context.</p>
<p>^ Do you mean because grammatically it could refer to “Mongolia” or possibly even “climate”? How would you change “having” to eliminate the alleged ambiguity, without changing anything else about the sentence or creating a new error?</p>
<p>
I’m not sure what you mean here. As I said, there is no ambiguity in that sentence, so you can’t “eliminate” it. There’s no error. In that particular context, in light of the meaning of the sentence, it is virtually impossible for “having” to modify “climate” or “Mongolia.” We know for sure it modifies the camel for obvious reasons.</p>
<p>If there are multiple nouns in a sentence, the only time a participle is not ambiguous is when we logically know what the referent is. For example, if we say I drank a cold glass of beer with my friends dripping with water, we don’t know whether it is the subject (“I”), the glass, or the subject’s “friends” that is soaked. So whether participles are ambiguous or not is largely dependent upon the sentence’s context and meaning. You could argue that a participle modifies what it is closest to, but that’s not quite true: e.g., in I gave the beer to the man cold, the adjective (which a participle essentially is), “cold,” modifies “beer,” not “man.” </p>
<p>Further, my point is that “having” technically can modify those other nouns in the sentence in construction (rather than in meaning/context), but the context is so strong that we don’t even take a second to consider whether it does or whether it is ambiguous, which is the right move since the sentence is not ambiguous.</p>