Bunuel wrote:
A summary of both the Uniform Crime Reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the victimization reports for the last decade show that while the number of police reports of serious crime has risen steadily, the number of victims of crime remains about the same.
(A) show that while the number of
(B) show while
(C) shows that while
(D) shows while the number of
(E) shows that while the number of
OFFICIAL EXPLANATION
Before we commence our detailed instructions on how each type of Sentence Correction questions must be tackled, we shall briefly analyze each of these examples so that you get a preliminary ‘feel’ about them.
The error in this sentence is the non-agreement in number between the subject and the predicate. The subject of the given sentence is the singular noun ‘summary’ while the predicate is the plural verb ‘show’. So, there is a fundamental grammatical error in this sentence which needs to be corrected.
(The phrase ‘a summary of both ...’ in the beginning of the sentence shows that ‘the victimization reports’ occurring later in the sentence is governed by the singular noun ‘summary’, and is not an independent subject of the sentence which could justify a plural predicate.)
Having recognized the error in the given sentence, we can rule out (A) as the answer.
Remember that you must presume that there is no error in the non-underlined part of the sentence. Since the subject summary is in the non-underlined part, and the predicate ‘show’ is in the underlined part,
it is only the predicate that needs to be changed and not the subject.Looking at the other answer choices, we can straightaway eliminate (B) because it also contains the same plural verb ‘show’.
We need not waste time reading (B) fully.
(C) corrects this error, and is worth being examined further. The version in this case will be “ ... shows that while police reports of serious crime has risen steadily, ...’. This version introduces another error - the plural subject ‘reports’ being followed by a singular predicate ‘has risen’. So, (C) is not the answer.
(D) does not have either of the two errors we saw in the first three choices, but it lacks the required conjunction ‘that’ after the verb ‘shows’. So, (D) can also be eliminated.
(E) completes a grammatical and meaningful sentence, and is the answer.You can note from the question and the analysis above that
(i) You should not try to fit each of the five choices into the given sentence to decide which is the best among them. This procedure will not only be time-consuming, but you will also be thoroughly confused. Instead, you should try to identify the error, if any, in the given sentence, and then select that choice which corrects that error while not introducing any new error.
(ii) You do not have to waste time reading choice (A) because it merely repeats the underlined portion of the given sentence.
(iii) Once you have noticed that the same error as in (A) is repeated in any of the other choices, you can eliminate that choice straightaway without wasting time to read it fully. (In most questions, two of the other choices will have the same error as the original sentence, and can be eliminated on that basis alone, reducing the number of real choices to just two.)
(iv) Having located a choice that has corrected the original error, carefully scrutinize it to see whether any new error has been introduced in it. If so, eliminate that choice.
(v) Having located the correct choice on the above basis, substitute that choice for the underlined part in the given sentence, and ascertain for yourself that it completes a clear and exact sentence, without awkwardness, ambiguity or redundancy as stipulated in the directions to Sentence Correction questions.
close
04 Jul 2019, 23:47
24%
(00:50)
wrong 
