ZMAT wrote:
By looking at AND i thought this issue is also testing parallelism. Are less and fewer parallel?
Quote:
With total sales of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer new subscribers than last year, the New England Theater Company is in danger of losing its building.
[highlight](A) of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer[/highlight]
(B) lower than three hundred thousand dollars and less
(C) lesser than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer
(D) fewer than three hundred thousand dollars and less
(E) of fewer than three hundred thousand dollars and of fewer
It's not a parallelism it's testing for here but a less than vs. fewer choice.... some posts here have suggested C - but if you insert option C into the sentence you can see this is wrong... "With total sales lesser than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer"... (ouch!).
'Lesser' is rarely used but occasionally seen in a comparitive sense as in 'the least of' (e.g. "it is the lesser of two evils"), or occasionally appearing in names of animals "the lesser spotted woodpecker".)
A common GMAT trap is to use money in SC - you need to be careful when considering whether the object proposed is countable or not. 'Money' is'nt usually used as a countable noun - it's not correct to say "one money", "two moneys (or monies)" etc - similarly we would use "less money," not "fewer money."
That said, we would use 'fewer' when counting (one dollar, two dollars) so a correct comparative term is "fewer dollars". eg: "I have less money than you", "I have fewer dollars than you"
Countable nouns can also be used to represent quantitave measurements (as we find in this question) – consider sums of money, periods of time and distance. Here, we'd see that whilst minutes / dollars / miles etc are countable, the correct form would be "less than ten minutes left", "less than a hundred dollars" and "less than three miles" Remember, here we are referring to quantities, not countable units.
Answer 'A' correctly assigns the property "of less than three hundred thousand dollars" to "total sales", and recognises new subscribers as countable, using "fewer".
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