bschoolaspirant9 wrote:
Are adverbial modifiers tested on the GMAT? If so, can anybody please tell us what the different types are and what the rules are?
Thanks.
(And I don't know why this is showing as a question, there is no other option)
GMAT never tests anything particularly w.r.t grammatical rules. They need the sentence meaning to be right (which is a consequence of a proper rule). Still, let's see what an adverbial is and how it can be tested on GMAT. I will give you a very basic idea (which I suppose is sufficient)
Before learning
adverbial, you need to know what a
prepositional phrase is (I will tell the connection, later)
Like every phrase (noun / verb / or whatever), a prepositional phrase functions like a preposition and
normally starts with a preposition.
Ex: in the bathroom
in the dustbin
on the table ... are prepositional phrases.
There are two basic types of prepositional phrases, viz., adjective phrases and adverbial phrases.
1.
Adjective phrases answer "which one"
ex: The book
on the table belonged to her.
2.
Adverbials answer "how/when/where"
ex: I couldn't sleep well
throughout the nightI will list two instances where I came across an adverbial phrase.
1. During usage of which. - Our basic understanding is that 'which' always modifies the noun or the noun phrase immediately preceding it.
Consider the example - I will buy the car
on Monday,
which can go faster than mine (
example picked from e-gmat's post on gmatclub)
Obviously which is not modifying 'Monday' and the highlighted portion is an adverbial (answers
when)
So,
which is modifying car, and this is a correct construction.
So what did we learn? That Which
neednot necessarily be preceded by a noun/noun phrase.
2. In parallelism - All the entities considered parallel should be of the same type i.e. all nouns/noun phrases, all adjectives/adjective phrases, all adverbs/adverbials. Read more about parallelism on this
e-gmat's post.I believe that you neednot know anything beyond this knowledge for gmat.