Identify the sentence that strictly maintains parallel grammatical structure:
The proposed urban development plan aims ________.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. not only to reduce vehicular congestion, but also to enhance pedestrian safety
Answer: not only to reduce vehicular congestion, but also to enhance pedestrian safety. Why not the others: 'not only reducing...' unbalances a gerund with an infinitive; 'to not only reduce... enhancing' mismatches verb forms; 'not only to reduce... pedestrian safety enhancement' pairs an infinitive clause with a bare noun phrase.
- Step 1: Analyze the correlative structure 'not only [X] but also [Y]': the grammatical elements following 'not only' and 'but also' must be identical in form and syntactic category.
- Step 2: Here 'not only' is followed by a to-infinitive ('to reduce vehicular congestion') and 'but also' is followed by an identical to-infinitive ('to enhance pedestrian safety').
Practise more Relative Clauses, Prepositional Complements, and Parallelism.
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