A 4 min read

To meet the rapidly rising market demand for fish and seafood, suppliers are growing fish twice as fast as their natural growth rate, cutting their feed allotment by nearly half and raising them on special diets.

1. their natural growth rate, cutting their feed allotment
2. their natural growth rate, their feed allotment cut
3. growing them naturally, cutting their feed allotment
4. they grow naturally, cutting their feed allotment
5. they grow naturally, with their feed allotment cut.

What does this question test?

This question tests your ability to select the answer that uses words in idiomatic manner.  It also tests your ability to ensure that the list in the sentence is parallel.

What does this sentence mean?

This sentence presents the measures that suppliers are taking in order to meet the rising market demand for fish and seafood.  The suppliers are growing fish at a higher rate.  They are accomplishing this by the following:

1. Cutting the feed allotment of fish by half.
2. Raising them on special diets.

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What are the errors in the original sentence?

To meet the rapidly rising market demand for fish and seafood, suppliers are growing fish twice as fast as their natural growth rate, cutting their feed allotment by nearly half and raising them on special diets.

 

This sentence has word usage error.  The sentence states that farmers are growing fish twice as fast as their natural growth rate.  Or in other words, that the growth rate is twice as fast as natural growth rate.  The use of adjective “fast” with growth rate is incorrect.  Lets consider a similar construction: Change rate to speed.  Both show change of measure per unit time. Now to describe speed we say:

• Speed is more – Correct
• Speed is higher – Correct
• Speed is fast – Incorrect.
• Car is driving fast. – Correct

Thus, on similar lines:

• Growth rate is fast. – Incorrect
• Growth rate is high. – Correct
• Fish can grow faster – Correct

This choice should not be eliminated because of apparent pronoun error. It is important to clarify this aspect since if we eliminate an incorrect answer choice for incorrect reason, we may end up marking incorrect choice as the correct answer.   We will apply the pronoun framework discussed here and see if this question has pronoun error.

The pronouns in question are two occurrences of “their”.  The pronoun “them” is in non-underlined portion of the sentence.  So there will not be any error related to this pronoun.  However, we may consider this pronoun as well in our analysis for the sake of complete analysis of the sentence in terms of pronouns.

Understand the meaning of the sentence and determine the logical antecedent

Per the meaning of the sentence, the suppliers have cut the feed allotment of FISH.  Thus logically “their feed allotment” implies “feed allotment of fish”.  Similarly, the suppliers are growing fish at a high rate.  Thus, logically “their natural growth rate” implies “natural growth rate of fish”.  Logically these pronouns must refer to “fish”.  Furthermore, the pronoun “them” should also refer to fish.  Thus all pronouns must refer to “fish”.

Determine if there are any other antecedents that can be referred to by this pronoun

Since these pronouns are plural, they could refer to another plural noun – “suppliers”.    However, the sentence would be illogical with this reference.    Nevertheless, this sentence uses ambiguous pronoun.

Select the Correct Answer Choice

Since the pronoun analysis shows an apparent pronoun ambiguity, we will eliminate the answer choice based on other more objective errors:

Also, as you will notice, all answer choices have similar structure – i.e. no answer choice even attempts to resolve this apparent pronoun ambiguity. Thus, in this question, pronoun ambiguity is acceptable to a certain degree. This question exemplifies the fact that pronoun ambiguity rules are hazy and we must not eliminate answer choices right away based on this error. We must first eliminate the answer choices based on other more definite error types – SV, verb, parallelism, modifiers.

Answer Choice Analysis:

Choice A:  Idiom Error as explained above.

Choice B:  Parallelism Error: The sentence has a list as shown in the meaning analysis.  This list is not parallel in this choice.  The list per this choice is:

• their feed allotment cut…
• raising them…

Choice C:  Meaning Error – This choice changes the intended meaning of the sentence and in fact while doing so renders the sentence illogical.  Remember that the original sentence states that suppliers are growing fish faster than the fish grows naturally.  Thus, two different rates of growth are being compared.

• Rate at which suppliers grow the fish
• Rate at which fish grow naturally.

Now choice C states “suppliers are growing fish twice as fast as growing them naturally”.  Now the two rates being compared are as follows:

• Rate at which suppliers grow the fish
• Rate at which someone grows the fish naturally.  – This part changes the intended meaning of the sentence – fish grow on their own – and makes the sentence illogical – one cannot grow fish and say that this is natural growth.

Choice D:  No Errors

Choice E:  Parallelism Error:  As discussed in Choice B.

Thus, Choice D is the correct answer.

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What are the key take-away messages?

1. Rate is not fast; rate is more or higher.
2. Correct sentence should communicate the intended meaning of the sentence.
3. Consider complete sentence and not just the underlined portion of the sentence to determine the correct answer.  In this question, element 2 of the list is in the non-underlined portion and drives the required structure of the list.