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RonPurewal
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Re: Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used sate

by RonPurewal Fri Apr 10, 2015 7:15 am

1131570003 Wrote:notice parallelism is being tested here.

burning is definitely wrong for not paralleling to "but do not denude the forest"

only burn is parallel to do no denude


this has already been discussed in the thread.

please read the entire thread before posting, so that we can avoid redundant discussion (and so that you don't have to wait for a response if your question is already answered!)
thank you.
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Re: Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used sate

by AmitS467 Thu May 07, 2015 9:43 am

RonPurewal Wrote:that's basically the idea.

the "ing"s also create a timeframe problem.
__ing modifiers describe things occurring in the same timeframe as the main sentence. that's not the point here; the point is to make generalizations——irrespective of the timeframe——about logging and about surface fires.

one use of the present tense is to make precisely these kinds of generalizations, so the present tense is what we need here.



Hi Ron,
Shouldn't we use which or that for both the nouns (Logging & Surface fires)in the sentence. I eliminated B for the reason of non-parallelism.

Thanks
RonPurewal
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Re: Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used sate

by RonPurewal Fri May 08, 2015 10:16 am

parallelism does not require modifiers that match.

if it's possible to write the modifiers so that they match -- without distorting the meaning of the sentence -- then, sure. on the other hand, the context often demands different kinds of modifiers.

here, "comma + which" describes all logging, whereas "that burn..." describes only some surface fires.
(incidentally, this is the difference between "xxxx that yyyy" and "xxxx, which yyyy" -- and, more generally, the difference between modifiers that are blocked off by commas and modifiers that aren't.)
...so, it's not possible to write matching modifiers without distorting the meaning.
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Re: Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used sate

by charmanineW924 Sat Oct 31, 2015 11:39 pm

RonPurewal Wrote:parallelism does not require modifiers that match.

if it's possible to write the modifiers so that they match -- without distorting the meaning of the sentence -- then, sure. on the other hand, the context often demands different kinds of modifiers.

here, "comma + which" describes all logging, whereas "that burn..." describes only some surface fires.
(incidentally, this is the difference between "xxxx that yyyy" and "xxxx, which yyyy" -- and, more generally, the difference between modifiers that are blocked off by commas and modifiers that aren't.)
...so, it's not possible to write matching modifiers without distorting the meaning.



Hi,Ron
I am confused about what you explain here. In my view ,"comma + which" cannot modify the preceding noun(here , logging) ,but " which" without comma can modify the preceding noun. My question is why you said "comma + which" describes all logging. Can you clarify it ? Thank you, Ron .
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Re: Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used sate

by RonPurewal Thu Nov 05, 2015 7:30 am

charmanineW924 Wrote:In my view ,"comma + which" cannot modify the preceding noun(here , logging)


'comma + which' cannot describe anything EXCEPT nouns.
what else did you think it could modify?
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Re: Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used sate

by RonPurewal Thu Nov 05, 2015 7:31 am

in the formal usage tested here, there are only 2 jobs that 'comma + which' can do.

those are described here:
usage-of-which-t746-15.html#p104933
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Re: Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used sate

by RonPurewal Thu Nov 05, 2015 7:31 am

charmanineW924 Wrote:but " which" without comma can modify the preceding noun.


on this exam you will NEVER see 'which' without a comma. (that's a typically british usage.)