tamal99 wrote:
leeye84 wrote:
Unlike most warbler species, the male and female blue-winged warbler are very difficult to tell apart.
(A) Unlike most warbler species, the male and female blue-winged warbler are very difficult to tell apart.
(B) Unlike most warbler species, the gender of the blue-winged warbler is very difficult to distinguish.
(C) Unlike those in most warbler species, the male and female blue-winged warblers are very difficult to distinguish.
(D) It is very difficult, unlike in most warbler species, to tell the male and female blue-winged warbler apart.
(E) Blue-winged warblers are unlike most species of warbler in that it is very difficult to tell the male and female apart.
Source : GMAT Paper Test Test Code 52 Q22
Hey
GMATNinja,
If I re-write option B using the concept of ellipse (not confident enough whether my concept is correct)
Unlike
[gender of] most warbler species, the gender of the blue-winged warbler is very difficult to distinguish.
Would it be correct??
Please explain.
Regards,
Tamal
Ah, the dreaded ellipsis. For anyone unfamiliar with the terminology, an ellipsis is simply a case in which a sentence implies words rather than stating them outright.
The problem is that you might hallucinate an ellipsis to fix incorrect answer choices. "That option isn't wrong - you just have to fill in all the stuff it's missing!"
Here's the deal: there's no clear, universal rule dictating when it's acceptable to leave words out of a sentence. So let's establish a common-sense approach: leaving stuff out is only allowed if the author's intention is abundantly obvious to even the laziest reader.
Here's a simple example: "Amy has more money than her irresponsible sister, Natalie." You probably did not have to torture yourself much to derive the meaning of the sentence even though, technically, I left out a word: "Amy has more money than her irresponsible sister, Natalie [
has]." The last word isn't necessary because no one would read the original sentence and interpret it to mean that "Amy has more money than Amy has her sister". That would make no sense at all.
Compare the above example with B:
Quote:
Unlike most warbler species, the gender of the blue-winged warbler is very difficult to distinguish.
As soon as you see "unlike most warbler species" you're set up to expect another species to follow. Once you realize that the comparison appears to be between species and gender, you'd have to double back and try to determine what the writer actually intended to compare. That's an awful lot to ask of a reader. And really, if we could fix comparison errors by imagining an ellipsis to fill in whatever appeared to be missing, there'd be no such thing as a comparison error on the GMAT!
Put another way: anytime the literal interpretation of a sentence is illogical, and you find yourself searching for unwritten ghost words to make sense of it, there's no way it's correct.
I hope that helps!
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