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555-605 (Medium)|   Comparisons|   Idioms/Diction/Redundancy|   Pronouns|   Use of Being|                           
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Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be hazardous 08 Aug 2023, 21:49
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rickyric395
... andrewng ...
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Hi rickyric395,

This isn't the Andrew you're looking for.

AndrewN
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Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be hazardous 09 Aug 2023, 00:16
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rickyric395
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This question doesn’t test a terribly difficult set of concepts, but I still see a lot of errors on it, mostly because people tend to miss the pronouns “them” and “they” in the non-underlined portion. If you catch those right away, it’s a little bit easier to get to the right answer efficiently, as we discussed in this YouTube video.

Quote:
(A) Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be
The idiom is one problem with (A): the correct idiom is “think of X as”, not “think of X to be.”

But let’s suppose that you don’t know that. After all, there are somewhere around 25,000 idioms in English; you don’t plan to memorize all of them, right?

Even if the idiom escapes you, the GMAT still gives you a decent reason to eliminate (A): the pronouns “they” and “them” are ambiguous, because both “consumers” and “household cleaning products” are plural. And you could argue that because “many of them” is the subject of the 2nd clause of the sentence, it most likely refers back to the subject of the 1st clause (“consumers”), and that would make the sentence illogical: “many of [the consumers] can be harmful to health…” (For more on the nuances of this particular type of pronoun issue, check out this video, and we also discussed this specific question in a more recent video.)

To be fair, this is tricky stuff, and I’m not 100% certain that the pronouns are WRONG in (A). After all, pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule on the GMAT (more on that in the same pronoun video mentioned above).

So if you aren’t sure about the idiom and wanted to be conservative, you could keep (A). But as we’ll see in a moment, there are answer choices that fix the pronoun issue completely.

Quote:
(B) Consumers may not think of household cleaning products being
I definitely can’t come up with any reason why we would say “think of X being…” I can’t even figure out what “being” is trying to do in that sentence, to be honest.

Plus, the pronoun issue mentioned in (A) is still a problem. See the explanation for (A) if you want more rambling (and resources) about the pronouns.

Anyway, (B) is out.
Quote:
(C) A consumer may not think of their household cleaning products being
This one is the easiest to eliminate. Sure, the word “being” doesn’t really make any sense in here (see the explanation for (B) for more on this), but the bigger issue is that “their” has no referent, since “a consumer” is singular.

So (C) is definitely out.

Quote:
(D) A consumer may not think of household cleaning products as
OK, so (D) very nicely cleans up the pronoun issue we described in answer choice (A). Because “a consumer” is now singular, “many of them” and “their” (in the non-underlined portion) MUST refer back to the only remaining plural noun, “household cleaning products.” And that makes perfect sense: it’s the “household cleaning products” that are hazardous to health, not the consumers.

So we can keep (D).

Quote:
(E) Household cleaning products may not be thought of, by consumers, as
The biggest problem with (E) is that it’s a passive version of (D). Passive voice isn’t automatically WRONG on the GMAT, but you need to have a really, really good reason to use it. Consider the following two sentences:

  • Charlie ate three kilograms of dosas. → Active voice, since the grammatical subject of the sentence (Charlie) actually “performs” the action (“ate”).
  • Three kilograms of dosas were eaten by Charlie. → Passive voice, since the main action of the sentence (eating) is performed by a noun (Charlie) which is no longer the subject of the sentence.

Again, the second version isn’t WRONG, but it’s a silly and inefficient way to write that particular sentence.

The same is true of (E): why say “household cleaning products may not be thought of, by consumers, as…” when we could just start the sentence with a nice, clean subject and verb (“Consumers may not think of household cleaning products…”), like the version in (D)?

(D) is better than (E), so it’s our winner.
GMATNinja, KarishmaB , egmat ,ExpertsGlobal,
AjiteshArun, AndrewN
RonTargetTestPrep , IanStewart isn't there is rule that if in 2nd clause pronoun is acting as subject then it refers to subject of 1st clause.
Here only E does this. So shouldn't E be preferred over D?
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What you are referring to, perhaps, is this - when facing pronoun ambiguity, it the pronoun plays the same grammatical role in its clause as does its antecedent in its clause, then the sentence is clearer.

A consumer may not think of household cleaning products as hazardous substances, but they can be harmful.

'they' clearly refers to 'cleaning products.' There is no other plural noun it can refer to. No pronoun ambiguity. Same is the case with 'many of them' in option (D).

Consumers may not think of household cleaning products as hazardous substances, but they can be harmful.

Logic says that 'they' stands for 'cleaning products' but when I first read 'they' I think that we are talking about consumers. I think that it will continue to say '... but they are mistaken...'
I don't really like this sentence but I may still not eliminate this option and will look at others.


Consumers may not think of household cleaning products as hazardous substances, but they are mistaken.

This sentence is fine even though 'they' could technically refer to two different nouns. Both logic and grammar point to 'consumers' as the antecedent.
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Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be hazardous 18 Sep 2023, 16:56
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When as is used for comparison then it should be followed by a clause. But in the below mentioned sentence, we as is followed by noun. How is this correct?

A consumer may not think of household cleaning products as hazardous substances, but many of them can be harmful to health, especially if they are used improperly.
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Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be hazardous 18 Sep 2023, 17:49
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poddarritika98
When as is used for comparison then it should be followed by a clause. But in the below mentioned sentence, we as is followed by noun. How is this correct?

A consumer may not think of household cleaning products as hazardous substances, but many of them can be harmful to health, especially if they are used improperly.
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Take a look at what you said:

When as is used for comparison then it should be followed by a clause.

Notice that "A consumer may not think of household cleaning products as hazardous substances" does not involve a comparison.

Rather, it uses the correct idiomatic structure "think of x as y."

In that type of structure and many others, "as" is correctly followed by a noun.

Here are some others:

As CEO, John accomplished a lot.

That building was once used as a courthouse but now is the home of a famous restaurant.
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Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be hazardous 18 Sep 2023, 22:52
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poddarritika98
When as is used for comparison then it should be followed by a clause. But in the below mentioned sentence, we as is followed by noun. How is this correct?

A consumer may not think of household cleaning products as hazardous substances, but many of them can be harmful to health, especially if they are used improperly.
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A clause is not necessary even with comparisons. Sometimes, a prepositional phrase suffices:

As in London, there are many public parks in Paris too.

Also, look at the various uses of 'as' here: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/as
It acts as a preposition in the sentence given by you - meaning 'in the role/function of'

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Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be hazardous 20 Dec 2024, 10:40
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