Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT preparation courses.
The authors of GMAT questions have what seems like a simple task: create one correct answer and four incorrect answers for each question, using the GMAT’s many testable concept areas to add difficulty and subtlety to each. However, in practice, this is easier said than done. Take Sentence Correction, for example, in which the GMAT tests a somewhat limited scope of grammar. To create five plausible (but four incorrect) choices, the author needs to hide grammatical errors in four sentences while leaving one correct in a way that isn’t entirely obvious, all using a few major grammatical devices like subject-verb agreement and parallelism. How many sentences lend themselves to subtle errors in both subject-verb agreement and parallelism, with the added benefit of doing so in a fashion that allows for the errors to appear close enough together for a streamlined “underlined portion”? Fewer than you’d think.
While the authors of the GMAT seldom focus on idioms, they do reserve the right to employ some regularly-occurring idioms that go hand-in-hand with other error categories to make that subtle distinction required for difficulty. Consider the sentence:
The endowment of Harvard University is twice as much than Stanford.
This sentence tests the parallel comparison of the endowment of one school to that of another. Because “the endowment of Harvard” cannot be compared to “Stanford”, but can be compared to Stanford’s endowment, this sentence requires the use of the phrase “that of Stanford” to correctly execute the comparison:
The endowment of Harvard University is twice as much than that of Stanford.
Even so, however, the phrase “as much than” is incorrect, based on an idiom. The correct phrase is “as much as”. Because the GMAT frequently uses comparisons to test parallel sentence structure, it tends to often test the following idioms that go with comparisons:
“as many as” or “as much as”
“so many that” or “so much that”
“more than” or “less than”
And here’s how they do it: did you ever have one of those toys as a kid that had pictures of three animals – say, a horse, a bird, and a dolphin – segmented in to head, body, and feet? The toy featured a wheel that you could spin to change the positions of each so that you could end up with, for example, the head of a horse on the body and fin of a dolphin with bird’s feet, and to a kid that’s about as funny as it gets, right? Well, the GMAT uses a similar wheel to create incorrect comparison idioms:
|
As |
So |
More/Less |
|
Many/Much |
|
|
|
As |
That |
Than |
With this table, the authors can “spin the wheel” on the last word in each phrase and create an idiom nearly as illogical as the horse-bird-phin: “as many that” or “as much than”. In doing so, the authors of the GMAT can make their job of creating subtle differences for four incorrect answers that much easier (maybe it was a Friday afternoon and they were trying to cut out for a weekend?), and the answer choices may appear that much more similar, making your job tougher. So be warned – when the GMAT tests comparisons, it often includes these phrases to round out the question. The GMAT preys upon your own mental laziness throughout the test, penalizing you for making assumptions or missing steps, so seize this opportunity to capitalize on the author’s favorite lazy device.
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