A SC doubt

Question

"The Labor Department’s monthly survey for August showed that 681,000 fewer Americans over the last year were working part-time because of slack business conditions and 266,000 fewer because they couldn’t find full-time jobs."

I read the above sentence in the WSJ today and wanted to understand how it is correct or if there is any explanation around it which would make me understand such sentence types.

Shri15kumar · Answer

Hello, Pawan0802,

I think the sentence is correct because it fulfils the meaning intended by the author correctly. May I know what part of the sentence is a question to you?

Pawan0802 · Answer

Thank you so much for your response.

My doubt in specific was that is the usgae of 618,000 fewer Americans... Correct ?

Posted from my mobile device

ccooley · Answer

In itself, the phrase "618,000 fewer Americans" is correct.

In this sentence, I'd be a little suspicious of it. I think the GMAT would call this sentence 'ambiguous,' in a few different ways:

- Is it true that they were working part time because of slack business conditions, or is it true that they  stopped  working part time because of slack business conditions? (I think this is the worst ambiguity in the sentence, and it's what makes me think that the GMAT would call this incorrect.)
- Is it true that 681,000 fewer Americans were working part-time (and that this was caused by slack business conditions), or is it true that some unspecified number of Americans stopped working part-time, and 681,000 of those were affected by slack business conditions?

However,  remember that GMAT SC problems always have multiple answer choices to compare against each other . Trying to look at a single sentence and decide 'right or wrong' is very different from what you'll actually do on test day. On test day, you could look at the alternatives. If they were less ambiguous, then you could cross this one off. But if they were all still just as bad, you'd have to look at other issues.

EducationAisle · Answer

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.

A SC doubt

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