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The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his

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Difficulty: 555-605 Levelx   Idioms/Diction/Redundancyx   Parallelismx   Parallelismx   Verb Tense/Formx                              
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szcz
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The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his [#permalink] New post   22 Jun 2023, 23:49
I understand that Option C is the best available option, but I dont quite understand how the parallelism fits.
From what I have learnt "Not X but Y" has a similar usage as that of other parallelism pairs. So the part of the sentence that follows "but" should make sense with what comes before "not" in the same sentence.
For example,
The goal was scored not by Messi but (was scored) by Ronaldo.
In this question if we follow the same thought process, we get the below sentence.
The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his inventions typically did not spring to life in a flash of inspiration but (did) evolved slowly.
As we can see the 2nd part of the sentence "did evolved slowly" does not quite make sense.

Would be great if anybody can help clear this doubt.

GMATNinja KarishmaB IanStewart
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GMATNinja
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Re: The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his [#permalink] New post   07 Jul 2023, 14:56
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szcz wrote:
I understand that Option C is the best available option, but I dont quite understand how the parallelism fits.

From what I have learnt "Not X but Y" has a similar usage as that of other parallelism pairs. So the part of the sentence that follows "but" should make sense with what comes before "not" in the same sentence.

For example,

The goal was scored not by Messi but (was scored) by Ronaldo.

In this question if we follow the same thought process, we get the below sentence.

The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his inventions typically did not spring to life in a flash of inspiration but (did) evolved slowly.

As we can see the 2nd part of the sentence "did evolved slowly" does not quite make sense.

Would be great if anybody can help clear this doubt.

GMATNinja KarishmaB IanStewart

It might help to be a little bit less rigid with the not/but construction, and just think of this as a nice, normal parallel list of two things, separated by a "but":

"...his inventions

    1) did not spring to life in a flash of inspiration

    but

    2) evolved slowly from previous works."

That makes sense, right? We get two completely reasonable statements: his inventions did not spring to life, and his inventions evolved slowly.

I hope that helps!
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The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his [#permalink] New post   05 Dec 2023, 06:04
GMATNinja wrote:
szcz wrote:
I understand that Option C is the best available option, but I dont quite understand how the parallelism fits.

From what I have learnt "Not X but Y" has a similar usage as that of other parallelism pairs. So the part of the sentence that follows "but" should make sense with what comes before "not" in the same sentence.

For example,

The goal was scored not by Messi but (was scored) by Ronaldo.

In this question if we follow the same thought process, we get the below sentence.

The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his inventions typically did not spring to life in a flash of inspiration but (did) evolved slowly.

As we can see the 2nd part of the sentence "did evolved slowly" does not quite make sense.

Would be great if anybody can help clear this doubt.

GMATNinja KarishmaB IanStewart

It might help to be a little bit less rigid with the not/but construction, and just think of this as a nice, normal parallel list of two things, separated by a "but":

"...his inventions

    1) did not spring to life in a flash of inspiration

    but

    2) evolved slowly from previous works."

That makes sense, right? We get two completely reasonable statements: his inventions did not spring to life, and his inventions evolved slowly.

I hope that helps!


GMATNinja

Are you suggesting that (C) uses an "X but Y" construction rather than a "Not X but Y" construction?
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Re: The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his [#permalink] New post   13 Dec 2023, 09:31
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SlowTortoise wrote:
GMATNinja

Are you suggesting that (C) uses an "X but Y" construction rather than a "Not X but Y" construction?

Yup, that's correct! You could think of it as two parallel verbs -- it's just that one of the verbs happens to be negative.
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Re: The voluminous personal papers of Thomas Alva Edison reveal that his [#permalink]
13 Dec 2023, 09:31
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