gmatpunjabi wrote:
Sorry about the late post. Here is my response to your questions Payal and I have a few of more of my own.
Mary’s perception that living in city is more expensive than living in countryside is flawed.
My Interpretation: What I see within in this sentence is that there is an explicit comparison between “living in the city” and “living in countryside”. These two phrases basically are examples of perceptions. It goes on to say that living in the city perception is flawed.
Clause 1 - Mary’s
perception that
Clause 2 -
living in city is more expensive than
living in countryside Clause 1 (Contd.) -
is flawed.
Now that we have broken this sentence down to its clauses, we can infer the meaning as follows:
What is flawed - the perception. (clause 1)
What is the perception - that living in city is more expensive than living in countryside (Clause 2 modifies perception)
My Analysis of YOUR Analysis - As you can see, our meaning analysis is vastly different. I do not think you have been able to understand the meaning correctly. And I can see what the problem is...Yes you cannot assign modifiers appropriately. But from your analysis of this sentence, I can sense that it is even more basic issue. You are not paying enough attention on understanding the sentence structure and that is why you are not able to understand the meaning appropriately. You picked out the comparison in the sentence. But you could not correctly mention what feature is being compared.
See for us non-natives, as we are building our understanding of long sentences, we should try to break the sentence into clauses and then do the meaning or error analysis. You really apply "divide and rule" policy since you are now tackling one clause at a time...I am sure if you had simplified the sentence as shown above, you would also have arrived at the correct meaning.
gmatpunjabi wrote:
Mary’s perception of living in city that is more expensive than countryside is flawed.
My Interpretation: What I am starting to see now is that is a sort of modifier. I still can’t grasp the meaning completely, but I do see an error in the modifier placement of that. Its like the placement of that now changes city and I feel the meaning of the sentence is nonsensical. Its like the meaning shifts from the perception to the noun city instead. I have been staring at this 2nd question for 15 mins lol. I think I finally see it the comparison has shifted from perceptions to city and countryside. Honestly I have no idea lol.
Clause 1 - Mary’s
perception of living in
city Clause 2 -
that is more expensive than countryside
Clause 1 (contd.) -
is flawed.
Now that we have broken this sentence down to its clauses, we can infer the meaning as follows:
What is flawed - perception of living in city (Note that this is different from sentence 1)
What is the perception – not stated (Note that sentence 1 stated what is the perception)
What else is stated – city is more expensive than countryside (Note that sentence 1 did not say anything about city being more expensive)
My Analysis of YOUR Analysis - For sentence 2, you were headed in the right direction. You were able to point out that "that" modifies city. However, I can assure you that if you had split the sentence into smaller parts, you would have been more confident in your analysis of this sentence and you would not have stared at the sentence for 15 minutes
gmatpunjabi wrote:
Review Material: The Manhattan Sentence Correctionl does not really focus on how the Meaning Changes with Modifiers. Its more about what parts of speech modify other parts of speech. Do you have any suggestions as this is one of the last topics I am having trouble with?
1: Understanding meaning becomes alot easier if the sentence is broken down into clauses. Its as if a complex puzzle becomes simplified all of a sudden. The interlinks between various parts of the sentence become more clear.
2: You state that modifiers is an issue that you are facing. However, in your analysis of sentence 1, you made an error in stating the correct comparison. I think you do spend the efforts in understanding the meaning and your grammatically concepts are also sound. What you lack is the approach that is especially designed for non-natives. Simplify the sentence into its clauses and then do your analysis...
3: Where to practice from -
e-GMAT SC course is based on these principles. For each sentence that we analyze, we break it down into its individual clauses. If you would like to see this in action, try out the free trial of both
e-GMAT SC course and
e-GMAT OGVR2 solutions.
Hope this helps.
Payal
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