PiyushK wrote:
Thanks Mike,
I tried to simplify the original choice as following, do you also feel that original choice and other choices yield different meaning ?
a) The citizen didn’t have no hesitation about
no hesitation = confidence
a) The citizen didn’t have confidence about
didn’t have confidence = hesitated
a) The citizen hesitated about apprehending the thief that stole the old lady’s purse.
After simplification, above sentence tells that citizen hesitated, but other choices tell citizen did not hesitate, and as I understand we must preserve the meaning of original choice as it is in grammatically correct choice.
Dear
PiyushK,
Here's the funny thing, that can be a bit hard to appreciate if you are not a native speaker of English: On purely logical grounds, the sentence ....
The citizen didn’t have no hesitation about X....means
The citizen had hesitation about X.In a purely mathematical sense, that is the logical meaning of the sentence. But that's
not the intended meaning.
The trouble is, language is not mathematics, and the common mistakes that people make defy all logic. In practice, in especially colloquial American speech, people use double negatives as an intensifier --- it's grammatically and logically incorrect, but this is the common mistake people make.
I don't want no broccoli. (
meaning:
I have absolutely no desire for any broccoli.)
The mathematical person might misinterpret that person as saying that he
wants broccoli, but that is is a reading that, in attaching to the literalism, misses the meaning in context. In context, the mistake many native English speakers make is using the double negative when they mean a single negative. When folks make this mistake, their intended meaning is different from the logical/mathematical meaning. When those two diverge, the GMAT SC wants us to be faithful to the intended meaning, the meaning in context.
GMAT SC is all about meaning, and in a truly good sentence, logic and meaning and grammar all work together and all support the same interpretation. This is a very poor question, so I would not take this as a model, but there are many official questions in which the prompt contains an error that, strictly logically, implies an absurdity, and our job is to figure out the sensible meaning intended and the logically consistent way to say it. On such a question, our job is most certainly not to try to maintain fidelity to the absolutely absurd thing the prompt literally implies, but to find a logically correct way to state the sensible thing the prompt was trying to say. If you get too mathematical with the "don't change the meaning" logic, that will get you in trouble.
Does all this make sense?
Mike