--Imporant---homicide fosiil record, Mary Leakey

[RonPurewal]

i don't know most of the terminology you're using, so, i can't answer those parts of your question.

1. her discovery of the earliest direct evidence of hominid activity is parallel to her painstaking documentation of East African cave paintings because both are noun phrase?

^^ "her discovery" || "her documentation"
...both of these are decorated with various modifiers, but the decorations are irrelevant. the point is that these basic structures are parallel.

2. What is the role of painstaking here? Is it an adjective which is modifying the noun phrase "documentation of East African cave"?

^^ yes.

[RonPurewal]

I know the rules of parallelism - nouns can be parallel to another noun as well as complex gerund but nouns cannot be parallel with simple gerund. Only simple gerund can be parallel with simple gerund.

^^ i have no idea what "simple gerund" and "complex gerund" mean.

in any case, whatever these are supposed to mean, you DEFINITELY don't need them—and by thinking about such things, you're creating "difficulty"/complexity that shouldn't even exist.

parallelism is a RELATIVE judgment!
just judge the parallelism in the answer choices RELATIVE TO EACH OTHER!
you don't need any fancy terms to do this... it's just "oh, these look MORE like each other; those look LESS like each other".
keep simple things simple!

[ElaS308]

I know the rules of parallelism - nouns can be parallel to another noun as well as complex gerund but nouns cannot be parallel with simple gerund. Only simple gerund can be parallel with simple gerund.

^^ i have no idea what "simple gerund" and "complex gerund" mean.

in any case, whatever these are supposed to mean, you DEFINITELY don't need them—and by thinking about such things, you're creating "difficulty"/complexity that shouldn't even exist.

parallelism is a RELATIVE judgment!
just judge the parallelism in the answer choices RELATIVE TO EACH OTHER!
you don't need any fancy terms to do this... it's just "oh, these look MORE like each other; those look LESS like each other".
keep simple things simple!

Thanks a lot Ron!
I will try to keep things as simple as possible when dealing with SC questions.
Also, I always find your explanations easy to understand.
I just wish I have your verbal skills for 75 minutes in the GMAT exam.

[RonPurewal]

you're welcome. (: