anubhavgilhotra Wrote:hi
Can you please explain why preventing is a gerund and how come improving is not a gerund.
no rules for this kind of thing; this is the sort of stuff that is inherent in the meaning of the sentence (which you should understand regardless of whether the sentence is correctly written).
example:
i like singing birds.
i like singing songs.
these are not the same; "singing" is a gerund in the second sentence, but not in the first. do you understand why?
I have read the post but was not able to understand. Secondly how can we parallel preventing illness - through improved worker performance.
Thanks
the core of the parallel construction is "save... and gain..." -- so those are the two things that absolutely must be written in the same way.
on the other hand, it appears you think that everything attached to those constructions -- modifiers and so on -- must also be written exactly in parallel.
that's definitely not true; if that were true, it would be basically impossible to write any sort of parallel construction with a decent amount of descriptive language in it.
as long as the core components of the parallel constructions are actually parallel -- noun versus noun, verb versus verb, or whatever -- then you can modify them however you want.
for instance:
i have a car and a truck.
i have a car and a big truck.
i have a car and a big, rusty old truck whose odometer has over 300,000 miles on it.
all of these sentences contain proper parallelism.