connecting punctuation and verb parallelism

[jinwuhome]

A scrub jay can remember when it cached a particular piece of food in a particular place, researchers have discovered, and tend not to bother to recover a perishable treat if stored long enough to have rotted.
A. tend not to bother to recover a perishable treat if
B. they tend not to bother recovering a perishable treat
C. tending not to bother to recover a perishable treat it
D. tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat
E. tends not bothering to recover a perishable treat it

OA: D

In Manhattan 4th SC, Chapter 10, it says "do not use a comma before and to separate two verbs that have the same subject.."
e.g. Earl walked to school, AND later ate his lunch. (Wrong)

In the above question, if the comma counts, then " AND tend/tends" seems wrong.

If I remove the ", researchers have discovered, " the sentence will look like, "A scrub jay can remember and tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat... " Since can is used in this sentence, why tends instead of tend?
For example, She can sing and dance. (Right)
She can sing and dances. (Wrong)

[aaron.1choi]

in this case, the comma before "and" is really part of the phrase ", researchers have discovered," and like you had said earlier,

"If I remove the ", researchers have discovered, " the sentence will look like, "A scrub jay can remember and tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat... "

the resulting sentence does not have a comma before "and" and is correct.

basically, this comma does not function in the same way as the comma in the sentence: "Earl walked to school, AND later ate his lunch."

You are correct that the tense should be "tends".

Does anyone know whether the addition of "it" is grammatically correct here? ie. could this be a correct statement (say if (d) were unavailable)?
"tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat it"

[jinwuhome]

"A scrub jay can remember and tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat... " Since can is used in this sentence, why the correct answer use tends instead of tend?

My understanding is that remember and tend are parallel. Why "...can remember and tend to..." is wrong?

[saptadeepc]

A scrub jay can remember when it cached a particular piece of food in a particular place, researchers have discovered, and tend not to bother to recover a perishable treat if stored long enough to have rotted.
A. tend not to bother to recover a perishable treat if
B. they tend not to bother recovering a perishable treat
C. tending not to bother to recover a perishable treat it
D. tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat
E. tends not bothering to recover a perishable treat it

OA: D

In Manhattan 4th SC, Chapter 10, it says "do not use a comma before and to separate two verbs that have the same subject.."
e.g. Earl walked to school, AND later ate his lunch. (Wrong)

In the above question, if the comma counts, then " AND tend/tends" seems wrong.

If I remove the ", researchers have discovered, " the sentence will look like, "A scrub jay can remember and tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat... " Since can is used in this sentence, why tends instead of tend?
For example, She can sing and dance. (Right)
She can sing and dances. (Wrong)

When you say She can sing and dance, you mean

She can dance and she can sing. (Replace can with "has the ability to")

where can is a helping verb.

but if you were to directly relate the subject to the verb, you would say She dances and sings.

i.e you cannot say scrub jay has the ability to tend ....

here "can remember"(has the ability to remember) is using the helping verb can, but scrub jay is actually doing the verb, therefore it would be incorrect to say "It "can" tend not to bother".

In this way, the meaning of the original sentence is preserved as well.

secondly, the sentence set off by commas is a non essential modifier so you can remove it and still preserve the meaning.

Therefore we can write

A scrub jay can remember when it cached a particular piece of food in a particular place and tend not to bother to recover a perishable treat if stored long enough to have rotted.

For example

Earl, who is the topper of his class, walked to school, which is near the bay area, and later ate his lunch.

Here, you can easily remove the modifiers between the commas and still preserve the meaning.

hope it helps.please correct if I m wrong somewhere

[aaron.1choi]

@jinwuhome earlier, i misunderstood your point about tend/tends

let me answer that now.

we can break this sentence down to:
subject: a scrub jay (singular)
two verbs joined by "and": "can remember", "tend/s"

A scrub jay "can remember" ...
A scrub jay "tends" ...

one wouldn't say: he/she/it tend. one would have to use the singular form tends.

as saptadeepc said above, the verb is not can tend, but just tends.

[jinwuhome]

Now the answer makes sense to me. Thanks guys for your help!! :)

[RonPurewal]

please search the forum!

i'm going to lock this thread. please read the following 2 threads:

1/
sc-usage-of-infinitive-vs-gerund-t616.html

2/
scrub-jay-can-remember-t9789.html

if you have questions, please post the questions in one of those threads. thanks.