Hi Pawan, there are two issues with this sentence that
don’t make this a
perfect GMAT sentence:
i) The intended meaning is clearly to address two things were observed
over the last year. Hence, the phrase
over the last year should be pushed
out, to make it clear that it is
common to both portions. So, a better sentence would be:
The Labor Department’s monthly survey for August showed that over the last year, 681,000 fewer Americans were working part-time because of slack business conditions and 266,000 fewer because they couldn’t find full-time jobs.
ii) Purely from a
grammatical similarity perspective, the intent is to convey:
(a) 681,000 fewer Americans were working part-time because of slack business conditions and
(b) 266,000 fewer Americans were working part-time because they couldn’t find full-time jobs.
If you notice, the grammatical usage of
because is
different in (a) and (b); (a) actually uses a
preposition (
because of) while (b) uses
because as a classical
subordinating conjunction (
because followed by a
clause). In this sentence, since these two
because are a part of the same parallelism sequence, one would expect a
uniformity of usage (either both
because used to support usage of
preposition or both
because used as
subordinating conjunction). Hence, following would be a better construct:
The Labor Department’s monthly survey for August showed that over the last year, 681,000 fewer Americans were working part-time because of slack business conditions and 266,000 fewer because of scarcity of full-time jobs.
One may argue though that
scarcity of full-time jobs is slightly different from
they couldn’t find full-time jobs.
Also note that I
have come cross an official question where GMAT showed
flexibility in this regard and hence, while the disparate usages of
because within the same parallelism sequence might
not be considered a
show-stopper, it is still not an
ideal usage.
_________________
Ashish
MBA-ISB Hyderabad, GMAT-99th percentile
www.EducationAisle.com