aarkay87 wrote:
GMATNinjaCould you please share another approach/split that is not based on idiom and that can eliminate options-A, C & E?
On further exploring, I came across one alternate approach by Ron Purewal that structure - [ Preposition] + [Noun] + [Participle] - is wrong unless the preposition refers directly to the NOUN.
Link:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/foru ... 910#p26678Could you please confirm and elaborate on this rule further? Regards
Rohit
Here's (A) again, but placed into a bigger chunk of the sentence:
Quote:
(A) ... Edith Abbott was convinced of social work education belonging in the university so that students could be offered a broad range of courses dealing with social issues.
This has a subtle meaning issue:
- so that generally introduces some sort of reason. For example: "Tim worked hard so that he could afford a vacation." Why did Tim work hard? So that he could afford a vacation -- in other words, his ability to afford a vacation was a result of his hard work.
- In (A), it sounds like the "so that" part is answering the question, "WHY was Edith Abbott convinced of social work education belonging in the university?" Was Edith Abbott convinced so that students could be offered a broad range of course? Was the ability to offer a broad range of courses a result of Abbott's being convinced* of something?
- Nope. That doesn't make any sense because there is no causal relationship here.
(C) has a meaning issue as well:
- Was Abbott ONLY convinced about the importance {...} WHILE (at the time when) students could be offered a broad range of courses??
- Or, going with an alternative interpretation, was Abbott convinced about the importance of social work education belonging in the university ONLY while (at the time when) students could be offered a broad range of courses??
- Nope. The "students could be offered a broad range of courses..." part is not meant to tell us WHEN Abbott was convinced of something.
- The fact that we can interpret this sentence in multiple ways is a red flag. And since neither interpretation makes much sense, we can get rid of (C).
Looking at (E), we either have a parallelism issue or a run-on sentence:
- If the "and" is a parallelism trigger, then the clause right after it ("students could be offered a broad range of courses") isn't parallel to anything.
- And if the "and" is meant to simply join two independent clauses, then we are missing a comma (and thus have a run-on sentence).
Either way, (E) doesn't work.
And, of course, we have the idiomatic issues that give us even more reason to (A), (C), and (E): "convinced that..." is better than "convinced of..." or "convinced about..." in this context. But again,
you don't want to lose too much sleep over idioms.The whole preposition/noun/participle thing definitely gives us another vote against these three options. However, I certainly would not recommend trying to refine this rule so that you can blindly apply it to future problems. SC is about meaning and clarity, and memorizing a list of increasingly complex rules won't do all that much for you. Also, notice that the linked post admits that this "rule" is only USUALLY the case -- in other words, like most "rules" on the GMAT, it can be broken.
I hope that helps!
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