chunjuwu wrote:
A new hair-growing drug is being sold for three times the price, per milligram, as the drug’s maker charges for another product with the same active ingredient.
A. as
B. than
C. that
D. of what
E. at which
Excuse me, I've reviewed all of the discussion before, could anybody tell me why the choice C is erroneous.
It helps to simplify this sentence, especially since some folks are being confused by the commas. This re-write eliminates the unnecessary adjective phrases but does not affect the issues at hand:
A drug is being sold for three times the price -------- the drugmaker charges for another product.I think this question is very inconclusive.
First, you don't need to fill in the blank at all. Read the above sentence and don't fill in the blank. The sentence is fine without any of the answer choices.
Second, I am not aware of any reason
THAT would be incorrect. It's a conjuntion linking two clauses:
X is being sold for three times the price THAT the drugmaker charges for Y.That seems OK to me.
Third, I think that
OF WHAT is a bit awkward but it seems grammatically correct and idiomatic:
X is being sold for three times the price of YHere, instead of having a conjuntion link two clauses, you have a preposition "of" and an object of the preposition Y being the phrase "what the drugmaker charges for another product".
This also seems correct to me.
So ... I think there are 3 equally acceptable ways to do this one: (C), (D), and no words there at all. And therefore I would personally guess that this is not a legit ETS question, and would not be on an actual GMAT.
If I'm wrong I'd love to see ETS's explanation.
Here,in the idiom "X is being sold for three times the price of Y", Y is not a price, it's a commodity, thus making the original sentence nonsensical: the drug-maker charges a commodity for something.
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