Welcome to GMAT Tuesdays my name is Kevin and we're not learning karate we
are working on the GMAT.
We are going to cover a very important concept participles and this came from a request from
a student they wanted to know more about what a participle is and how we use it.
I should say right from the beginning that we're going to focus on one aspect of participles
and ignore another part the other part is how they lend a hand in our verb tenses. If you're
curious about that please make a request below in the comments, I'd be happy to help um but it's
just too much for one video. Okay, so I've got my trusty orange pen and we can begin. So a participle
is a word of course talking about words for
a participle is a word formed from a verb so we take a verb and it is used as an adjective or a
noun. So you take a verb and you change it a little bit and use it as an adjective and a noun that
sounds pretty straightforward but when you get into sentences it can get a little confusing. So
here we have two examples, um in the first example we have a verb that became an adjective running. So
the running dog is mine. Running here describes dog, it's telling us which dog to pay attention to um
and run is usually a verb we use it all the time as a verb and so it can get kind of confusing
like how do this verb all of a sudden end up as an adjective well that's because we have
participles next sentence. Sleeping promotes health here we took the verb sleep
added ing to it and made it the subject of the sentence it's a noun we're talking
about the concept of sleep not actually doing the action or the inaction of sleep.
So participle refers to a single word then we have participle phrases this is
the concept that I think really causes trouble on the GMAT and something to pay attention to
and understand so in this example the dog seeing the squirrel ran faster wants to get the squirrel.
So here all of that is a participle phrase beginning with our participle scene
here we have crawling into bed she fell asleep so the beginning of the sentence here we have
this phrase crawling into bed she fell asleep and the crawling into bed is our participle. So
this leads us to our big idea participles and participle phrases are... what they? Are something
very important, they are modifiers! They modify things they tell us about something else
fires excellent and so where this comes becomes tricky on the GMAT is you might see a participle
phrase they might use a very long participle phrase in a sentence and you'll see like this
verb scene or crawling you think oh there's the main verb of the sentence but don't be tricked.
They're putting that in there to complicate things and the key is to ignore the participle get
the participle out of the way get the phrase out of the way and like i said in my previous video
about cutting through the mess to get to the or cutting out the fluff to get to the core meaning
participles and participle phrases need to be cut out so you can get directly to the meaning of the
sentence. Here is an example from the official guide this is the 13th edition question number
111. It's a sentence correction question um and it says a mutual fund having
billions of dollars in assets will typically invest that money in hundreds of companies,
rarely holding more than one percent of the shares of any particular corporation.
So a couple things to point out here, we don't just have one uh participle phrase which is
in the underlying portion here "rarely holding more than one percent of the shares of any particular
corporation" that whole thing at the end there is a participle phrase. We do have an adverb here um
but that's describing uh the participle um but we also have another participle up here too, "having
billions of dollars in assets" you would think having is the main verb you're like mutual fund
having you're like oh there we go but actually you need to cut that out and see that it's will
typically invest that's the main verb of this sentence. So it's really a mutual fund we'll invest
and then we have the uh predicate here that money in hundreds of companies and so this participle
phrase needs to refer to the mutual fund. It needs to be the predicate of the mutual fund and we had
in answer choices of the incorrect answer choice and you might think oh well I have "having" here and
then "holding" here oh I'm going to keep these parallel these verbs parallel and add an and
and rarely do they hold more than one percent and that will you think keep the sentence um
in parallel and correct. Maybe this weird phrasing at the end but if you know about participle whoa
well there's an earthquake if you know about participle phrases um you'll know that this is
going to change the meaning. No longer rarely do they hold more than one percent does it refer to
our mutual fund it changes it and is no longer the predicate of mutual fund also another problem
here too no longer do they we have a plural uh pronoun when really we would need a singular
one. So the answer choice here this is actually written correctly the answer choice was A here so
this is a good example of how to use a participle phrase as the predicate of your sentence. All right
if you have any questions, I know this is a tough concept please do ask questions below and if you
have a request for a video please make a request! We're always looking for new ideas and things to
do.That's it from me today. Be excellent to the universe and I'll see you next time.