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4.ED FORMS - Verbs or Modifiers.
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4.ED FORMS - Verbs or Modifiers.
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“ED FORMS” – VERBS OR MODIFIERSScientists have recently discovered what could be the largest and oldest living organism on Earth, a giant
fungus that is an interwoven filigree of mushrooms and root like tentacles spawned by a single fertilized
spore some 10,000 years ago and extending for more than 30 acres in the soil of a Michigan forest.
This is probably one of the most discussed problems in GMAT Verbal SC section. This sentence is a cake
walk for those who understand verb-ing and verb-ed modifiers thoroughly, and is confusing to the hilt
for those who have just started to learn these concepts. The tactfully crafted answer choices of this
problem keep bringing this question on various forums for discussion and detailed explanation. So let’s
take a look at those interesting answer choices:
A. extending
B. extends
C. extended
D. it extended
E. is extending
In the first glimpse, the sentence looks simple and easy. You scan the sentence, discover the word
“spawned”, look at conjunction “and”, think, “Oh! Parallelism dude. How simple!”, mark Choice C. But
all the excitement is robbed off by the Answer Key page that says Choice A is the correct answer.
So where did you go wrong? Aren't “spawned” and “extended” grammatically parallel? They both have
the same structure. The instinct (especially of the non-natives) is to believe that words with “ed” are
simple past tense verbs. So if you took “spawned” to be the simple past tense verb, you looked for the
same for “extending” and marked “extended”. You got the incorrect answer.
VERB-ED – CAN BE SIMPLE PAST TENSE OR MODIFIER
So, what is happening in this sentence? “Extended” fits as simple past tense verb and looks parallel to
“spawned”. Then how can “extended” be incorrect? Well, the answer is that Verb-ed forms can be used
in two ways –One as verb in simple past tense and the other as modifier (also called Verb-ed modifiers)
and in this case it is used as the latter (explained later). In essence, the same word, for example
extended, can assume the role of a verb in simple past form or that of a modifier. The challenge in the
question is to determine whether “spawned” and extended” are verb-ed modifiers or just the verbs and
then decide in what form should “extended” be used.
To determine that, let’s examine two simple examples:
a. The company extended the training period for the interns. – extended = simple past tense
b. The training period extended last year made many interns unhappy. – extended as verb-ed modifier
, Let's analyze the meaning of sentence a. The sentence clearly conveys that that the company did the job
of extending the training period for the interns. The word “extended” works as “verb” in this sentence.
Sentence b means that many interns became unhappy because the training period was extended. In this
sentence, the verb is "made". "Extended" is the verb-ed modifier that is giving additional information
about "the training period". So, here we see that the same word "extended" can work as a verb and as a
modifier, depending upon how it has been used in the sentence. In fact, most of the words can be
written as “verb” as well as “modifier” if we add “ed” to them. “Spawned” is also one of them.
If you want to know how to tell whether a verb-ed word is a simple past tense verb or a modifier, read in
the following section about this simple test that can be very handy.
There is a simple test we can perform to find out whether the verb-ed is a verb in simple past tense or
the verb-ed modifier. Here is the test:
Let’s have another look at both the examples above:
a. The company extended the training period for the interns.
The subject of the sentence above is “The Company” . Now ask yourself, “Is the subject the doer of the
verb?” In other words, did the company extend the training. The answer is yes it did. The Subject Verb
pair makes sense. Hence, in this sentence, extended is used as a verb in simple past.
b. The training period extended last year made many interns unhappy.
The subject here is “The training period”. The next word is the verb-ed “extended”. Is it a verb or a
modifier? Ask this question: “Did “the training period” do the action of “extending”? The answer is “No”.
The action of extension was not done by the training period. In other words, the Subject-Verb pair does
not make sense. This tells you that “extended” is a verb-ed modifier here and not the verb.
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