More, most, enough and all - work with both countable and uncountable noun.

What to choose between?
A) He has more patience...
B) He has greater patience...

Hello Roy867,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, both A and B are perfectly acceptable options. A might be a shade superior, as it is slightly clearer, but it is unlikely that the GMAT will make such a subtle distinction the deciding factor between two answer choices.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team
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KarishmaB GMATNinja egmat BillyZ

Could you help me understand parallelism in this sentence. Shouldn't parallelism be followed in The more X, the more Y sentence structure where X and Y are parallel?
Correct option D : A long-term study of some 1,000 physicians indicates that the more coffee these doctors drank, the greater was their likelihood of having coronary disease
Here noun coffee that doctors drank(that ellided) is parallel to clause their likelihood was.
How is this correct?

waytowharton

First, these structures are a bit tricky to write in parallel, because the two things that are correlated aren't always easy to describe in the same way. We may have an easy one such as "The more I study, the more I learn." But what happens when I switch to "the greater"? I have to describe what actually becomes GREATER, and that's a noun, not a verb. So it turns into something a little clunkier, like this: "The more I study, the greater is my learning." In real-life usage, most of us would probably just cut "is" there and say "The more I study, the greater my learning" (or results, etc.). However, I'm not sure that would fly on the GMAT.

Now, what would happen if we added an extra word to our first part? "The more math I study." Does that change the whole structure of the sentence? Not really. "More" is still modifying the clause, not just the following noun (math). The same applies to the case you're asking about: "more" doesn't apply just to the noun "coffee," but to the action. It describes how much coffee people are drinking, not some property of the coffee itself. In the second part, we're describing a result. not a second thing the doctors did, so we are stuck with that weird inverted structure. In any case, now we have two clauses, so parallelism is intact!
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Don't try to put everything into neat packets. It just doesn't work that way with language. Different contexts will require different handling.
Normally our sentence structure is "they drank more coffee" but we need "the more coffee they drank" to put it into the "the more A happened, the more B happened" structure to show cause-effect. But instead of more, we have greater because likelihood is a numerical value which would be greater/higher than another.
Now we could say something like "the more coffee they drank, the greater the likelihood became..." to keep parallelism. But something like this is not in the options. So we look for what best is available.
Note that parallelism leads to a clean structure and hence is preferred in formal language. But we make do with as much parallelism as is available. If the elements are not completely aligned, the sentence does not become incorrect.
Yet again, focus on the options and pick what best you have available. Don't try to judge the sentences in isolation.
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