The Sentence Correction Dilemma
A GMAT test-taker encounters the following sentence: 'The company's decision to outsource its customer service, which was announced last week, have caused many employees to worry about their jobs.' The test-taker must choose the best version among five options. Option A is the original. Option B: 'The company's decision to outsource its customer service, which was announced last week, has caused many employees to worry about their jobs.' Option C: 'The company's decision to outsource its customer service, announced last week, have caused many employees to worry about their jobs.' Option D: 'The company's decision to outsource its customer service, which was announced last week, has caused many employees to worry about their job.' Option E: 'The company's decision to outsource its customer service, which was announced last week, have caused many employees to worry about their jobs.'
1. Identify the grammatical errors in the original sentence (Option A).
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The original sentence has a subject-verb agreement error: the subject is 'decision' (singular), but the verb is 'have' (plural). It should be 'has'. Additionally, the relative clause 'which was announced last week' is intended to modify 'decision', but it is placed after 'customer service', so it could be misconstrued as modifying 'customer service'. However, the main error is the subject-verb agreement. The phrase 'to worry about their jobs' is fine, though 'their' refers to 'employees', which is clear.
2. Which option is the best choice and why?
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Option B is the best choice. It corrects the subject-verb agreement by using 'has' instead of 'have'. It keeps the relative clause 'which was announced last week' in a position where it most logically modifies 'decision' (though it is adjacent to 'customer service', the context makes it clear). Option C changes the verb to 'have' (incorrect) and removes 'which was', making it an absolute phrase that could be seen as modifying the entire preceding clause, but the verb agreement is still wrong. Option D changes 'jobs' to 'job', which is less precise because each employee has one job, but 'their jobs' is idiomatically fine. Option E is identical to A. Therefore, B is the only one that corrects the agreement error without introducing new issues.