GMAT Ninja SC Expert - Ask Me Anything about GMAT SC and Grammar

GMATNinja
Oops sorry that i posted CR questions.
Can you please clarify on this question why option c is incorrect?
On account of a law passed in 1993, making it a crime punishable by imprisonment that a United States citizen hold gold in the form of bullion or coins, immigrants found that on arrival in the United States they had to surrender all of the gold they had brought with them.

(A) On account of a law passed in 1993, making it a crime punishable by imprisonment that a United States citizen hold

(B) With a law passed in 1993 that makes it a crime punishable by imprisonment that a United States citizen hold

(C) A law passed in 1993 that made it a crime punishable by imprisonment for a United States citizen holding

(D) Because of a law passed in 1993 making it a crime punishable by imprisonment for a United States citizen to hold

(E) Due to a law being passed in 1993 that makes it a crime punishable by imprisonment for a United States citizen to hold


In option c Law has verb passed and it has modifier that made it, for me it makes sense.
However in option D, what making is modifier?

A group of paleontologists recently announced that a site in Utah has yielded fossils of some of the biggest armored dinosaurs ever found, and that they were at least 25 million years older than any similar dinosaur type previously found in North America.


(A) and that they were at least 25 million years older than any similar dinosaur type previously

(B) and they are at least 25 million years older than those of any similar dinosaur type that previously was

(C) and the fossils are at least 25 million years older than any similar dinosaur types that previously were

(D) fossils that are at least 25 million years older than those of any similar dinosaur type previously

(E) fossils at least 25 million years older than similar dinosaur types previously

GMATNinja can you please explain option D, i eliminated this because i thought two independent clauses are joined with comma

in D ...fossils after the comma is an appositive ....its not starting a new IC

Posted from my mobile device

Can you please elaborate more? For me fossils are subject and verb is are older than? what am i being wrong at here

Dear Junii,

The structure of D is noun + noun modifier = relative pronoun clause.
Indeed you do not have a bonafide verb: Fossils ... what ?
Although "that are ..." is a clause, yet when binded with "noun modifier" fossils play role of noun phrase.

In sum, what follows after that is own structure of S +B.

As stated in our Beginner's Guide to SC, what's really important is "your ability to immediately recognize the most frequently-tested rules as soon as you see any SC question... If an answer choice features a basic grammar topic, like parallelism or pronouns or modifier placement, then you absolutely can’t afford to miss it."

But things like parallelism can get really, really hard. Sometimes you'll recognize that parallelism is a potential issue but still fail to make the right choice in the end. Does that mean you won't be able to get a good verbal score? Not necessarily. The GMAT is an adaptive test, and the most important thing is to avoid botching the easy stuff. If you get the trickiest parallelism question right but then fail to spot a glaring subject-verb agreement error somewhere else, you'll probably be worse off than the test-taker who gets the easier one right but misses the harder parallelism question.

So instead of worrying about mastering every little nuance of the frequently-tested rules, focus on simply identifying those things -- make sure you're noticing things like pronouns, noun modifiers, parallelism triggers, etc. Will you always know what to do once you've spotted those things? Of course not -- again, GMAT SC can be really hard. But if you train yourself to recognize those things when they appear, you'll be fair less likely to make a costly mistake on something easy.

For more on setting priorities on SC, check out this video.

I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but I hope it helps a bit!

This particular examples comes from a post by egmat:

"3. As Joel Bregman hoped, dozens of young stars turned up in each of the three dead galaxies—and as an added surprise, they even appeared in Messier 105."

This sentence actually combines two independent clauses, so let's identify the subject and verb in each:

1) dozens turned up.
2) they appeared.

I HOPE THAT ANSWERS YOUR QUESTION (better late than never... sorry for the delay!).

Frankly, I don't think this sort of thing is tested that much on the GMAT. It's not uncommon to see "every" used in a way that has absolutely no impact on the verbs. For example, check out this official answer:

"The Swedish warship Vasa, sunk in 1628 and raised in 1961, was preserved in the cold water of Stockholm harbor, where low salinity inhibits the growth of marine borers that in most seas devour every exposed scrap of a sunken ship's wooden hull."

Here "every exposed scrap" is the object of the verb "devour," so the "every" has no impact on the number of the verb (singular or plural).

Other official examples of "every" being used in a way that doesn't effect the number of the verb can be found here and here.

What you're asking about is using "every" with the subject of a verb, and, as far as I know, that's less common the GMAT. Here's one example:

"As a result of a supernova explosion, every human being on Earth was bombarded on February 23, 1987, by about 100 billion neutrinos; fortunately, neutrinos are harmless elementary particles that are produced in nuclear reactions and that interact very weakly with matter."

Here we can see that a singular verb (was bombarded) is used with the subject "every human being." Why singular? Well, we are referring to every single human being individually. But notice that we don't even have to worry about whether the subject and verb should be singular or plural because the singular verb is given in the non-underlined portion of the sentence.

We see something similar in this question, but with "each" instead of "every":

"Scientists say that each of the photographs taken of the Ares Vallis plain by the Mars Pathfinder indicates the overwhelming extent of the flooding on the planet billions of years ago and the degree to which rocks were scattered by its force."

Here we are referring to each and every single photograph, so a singular verb is appropriate. This is one of the few examples I can think of where you actually have to worry about this sort of thing.

When using "each" or "every" with the subject, I sometime think about a looping piece of computer code -- we want to apply the singular verb to each and every individual one by one:

• Photograph 1 indicates the overwhelming extent...
• Photograph 2 indicates the overwhelming extent...
• Photograph 3 indicates the overwhelming extent...
• Etc.

In such cases, we are trying to say that each and every individual does the action -- in this case, each and every photograph indicates the overwhelming extent (it's not a group effort -- each one does this on its own).

This sort of thing (which corresponds to the first case being asked about here) rarely comes up as a decision point on the GMAT, so I wouldn't waste much time on it. (And now I'm wondering why I've spilled so much ink on it here! ) As for the other cases, I'd suggest applying a similar logic and wouldn't recommend trying to come up a set of black and white rules for these relatively rare situations.

But if you see this sort of thing in an official question and have trouble with it, please tag us!

I agree with you! Whatever follows the comma should be something that can secure a £1.8bn bail-out. So it makes much more sense for TFL itself to follow the comma, rather than TFL's financial plans.

Honestly, there's often a disconnect between really good "real-world" writing -- in, say, The Economist or the New York Times -- and what the GMAT views as acceptable on SC. So you probably don't want to waste your time looking at non-GMAT sentences, and trying to analyze them through a GMAT lens. It's kind of an interesting exercise, but I'm not sure that it'll move the needle on your GMAT score.

For a long and utterly useless rant on the disconnect between reality and GMAT SC, check out this post.

On the whole, we actually think that studying a list of idioms is kind of a waste of time (although you will find a couple of idiom lists in the "GMAT Club resources" section of that article, if you do want to go in that direction).

Similarly, we don't think that knowing a large number of obscure grammar rules will really make a difference in most students' SC performance. Instead, it's best to:

1) Become 100% rock solid on the basics. Even harder questions often test a small number of common concepts -- these concepts may just be disguised in complex ways. For a rundown of the basic rules that we find most useful, check out this video.

2) Once you've eliminated as many answer choices as possible based on the above common grammar errors, focus on differences in the logic and meaning of the remaining options. Sure, it's not as satisfying as memorizing a long list of rules -- but at the end of the day, the GMAT is a reasoning test, not a do-you-know-the-rules test. So use the basic rules to get as far as you can, and then focus on logic/meaning. Check out this video for more on using logic/meaning on GMAT SC.

This post might also give you a sense of what it takes to go from "good" to "great" -- whatever that might mean -- on GMAT SC.

I hope that helps!

Hi GMATNinja,
/ Verbal Experts - can you please help on the below query.

Thanks for the support .

First, the good news: the GMAT doesn't test our knowledge of grammar jargon. For the most part, you just need to be able to distinguish between nouns, verbs, and modifiers. If you enjoy the minutiae of grammar beyond those basics, that's great, but, thankfully, the GMAT will never ask you to match a word with the correct terminology. In fact, as explained in our SC Guide for Beginners, worrying too much about the jargon and technical grammar "rules" can actually backfire.

That said, yes, you need to have an intuitive understanding of some grammar fundamentals in order to achieve elite results on GMAT SC. Also, you need to know enough about the most frequently tested concepts (for more on that, check out the list under "Step 1: DEFINITE errors first" in our SC guide).

Beyond that list, I can't say I have a specific resource that will give you what you are looking for. But try not to get too caught up in the labels while you are doing practice problems. It's not a bad idea to go through the Manhattan books and revisit certain chapters/sections as needed, but don't let worries about terms like "participles" distract you from what's important: (1) finding definite errors based on the most straightforward, frequently tested concepts and (2) comparing the remaining choices based on meaning.

I hope that helps a little!

The good news is that the GMAT is not meant to be a grammar test, and you'll never be asked what a modifier technically modifies. And unfortunately, I don't think that memorizing an exhaustive list of "rules" governing adverbs and adjectives would do much good -- in fact, it might just encourage you to think too mechanically instead of focusing on meaning and logic.

With that in mind, let's take a look at a simplified version of choice (B) both with and without the "only":

• "Students will take ethics seriously if it is taught as a separate, required course." - Here we have a simple if-then statement (no "only"). IF ethics is taught as a separate/required course, THEN students will take ethics seriously. Notice that there might be OTHER ways to get students to take ethics seriously -- for example, IF there is a Netflix mini-series about the importance of ethics or IF Kim Kardashian tells everyone to take ethics seriously. Teaching ethics as a separate/required course is ONE way to get students to take ethics seriously, but it's not necessarily the ONLY way.
• "Students will take ethics seriously only if it is taught as a separate, required course." - Putting the "only" back changes the meaning entirely. Now there is in fact only ONE way to get students to take ethics seriously, and that's by teaching ethics as a separate/required course. Do we care what exactly the "only" modifies? Not really. What matters is what it does to the meaning. In other words, we care about the function, not the technical label. What matters is that we are distinguishing between a simple "if-then" condition and an "if ONLY-then" condition.

Now let's look at a simplified version of your "Statement 2": "Students will take ethics seriously if it is taught only as a separate, required course."

• The position of the "only" has been changed, and this does change the meaning a bit. Now we are distinguishing between (1) teaching ethics as a separate/required course and (2) teaching ethics ONLY as a separate/required course.
• In this case, the focus is on the teaching part -- maybe there are many different ways that we could teach ethics (i.e. as a separate course that is NOT required, as part of some other course(s), as an instructional video game that students are free to access, whatever...). And maybe we want to utilize more than one of those options. Without the word "only," notice that it doesn't matter what OTHER options are available -- as long as we have the separate/required course, students will take ethics seriously.
• But as soon as we add the word "only", things change. Now it sounds as though making those OTHER options available would actually be a problem. If we have a separate/required course BUT also have all those other options, students might NOT take ethics seriously! Why? Because apparently students will take ethics seriously if it is taught ONLY as a separate/required course (and not taught any other way).

Phew, that's a bit confusing. Luckily, the GMAT isn't asking us to worry about that distinction here. As long as you understand what the "only" does to choice (B), you've done your job. And unfortunately memorizing a bunch of rules is unlikely to help.

Instead, if you're ever confused about the word "only" is doing in a sentence, ask yourself, "What is the difference in meaning between the sentence WITH the 'only' and the sentence WITHOUT the 'only'?" (As explained in our SC Beginner's Guide, to get to an elite SC score, you’ll have to get pretty good at finding the strict, LITERAL differences in meaning between two or more answer choices.)

To help streamline things, please post any follow up on the thread for this specific question.

I hope that helps!

Sorry for my ridiculously slow reply! I'm glad that you've found the SC videos to be helpful, and I worry that I'm too late to be helpful with this response. But I'll give it a try, anyway.

As for your time management woes: unfortunately, there isn't a really satisfying solution to your situation, because I can't tell you what the underlying issues are. It's pretty common to struggle with time management on the verbal section, but I can't tell you how to fix it until you know why it's happening in the first place. It could be that you're a fundamentally slow reader. Or, it could be that you rush through the passage and then spend a ton of time struggling with the answer choices. Or, it could be that you waste time re-reading things over and over again. Or maybe you move at a good pace through most questions, but get extremely stubborn on one or two questions that have you stumped.

Each of these different underlying issues will require different solutions.

To get going, I'd recommend reading this article about CR basics, though I'll admit that it isn't so radically different from what I've said in the CR videos. Then, get some LSAT books -- this one is a decent place to start. Complete the Logical Reasoning sections, really thinking about your process. Are you completing each step outlined in the CR Beginner's Guide article? Are you wasting time with re-reading? Are you getting bogged down in 1 or 2 questions that you should just learn to let go? (Side note: ignore the LSAT's ridiculous 35 minute time limit. Just complete the section with test-like intensity, and note down how long it took you. You're just trying to incrementally bring down your time as you hone your process).

Once you find the root cause(s) of your time management issues, think through some ways to prevent them from happening (e.g., letting go of questions that are a waste of time, or slowing down when you read the passage so that you can efficiently eliminate answer choices). Add these changes to your process, and see whether your times start to come down.

This is a tricky issue to solve, and doesn't happen overnight (read this article if you don't believe me!). So, be patient with yourself as you figure it all out.

One last thought: if you had to rush through the last EIGHT questions and still scored a 34V, you obviously have some pretty solid skills. So if I'm being 100% honest, it's impossible for me to know what your "ceiling" might be on verbal, but I suspect that there's some hope here. And hopefully, you've already harnessed quite a bit of that potential already while you waited for my ludicrously delayed response.

I'm not sure if you're planning on a retake, but I hope all of this helps a bit, and good luck with everything!

(Thanks Gknight5603 for your input on this one!)

Indeed, "fossils that are at least 25 million years older..." is just a modifier (an appositive, if you like the jargon) -- basically, an adjective that modifies the aforementioned fossils:

"A group of paleontologists recently announced that a site in Utah has yielded fossils, fossils that are at least 25 million years older..." There is no need to use a conjunction with such comma-separated modifying info.

We get this question all the time. For a couple other examples, check out the following posts:

• Over the past ten years, cultivated sunflowers...
• Photovoltaic cells are made of two thin layers...
• Floating in the waters of the equatorial Pacific...

If you have further doubts, feel free to post them on the thread for that specific question.

I hope that helps!

In (D), "making" is just an adjective that modifies "law" (check out use #4 in this article).

As for (C), "passed" is actually a modifier (describing the "law"), not a verb. And if we do look at "passed" as a verb, we run into a couple issues:

First, if "passed" is a verb, that means that the noun modifier "that made it a crime" has to reach behind that verb to get to the noun in modifies ("law"). There are certainly exceptions to the touch rule (see usage #4 in this article), but reaching all the way behind a verb is a stretch. For example:

"My favorite restaurant is in Queens, which serves delicious Greek egg and lemon soup." - The "which..." clause has to reach behind the prepositional phrase and verb to get to the noun it should modify ("restaurant"). The structure in choice (C) is no better, if we assume "passed" is a verb.

Also, if "passed" is a verb, then we have two independent clauses inappropriately joined by a comma: "A law passed in 1993, immigrants found..." - If "passed" is a verb, then we need a conjunction with that comma.

And unfortunately (C) doesn't work even with "passed" as a modifier. Stripping out the modifiers, (C) can be boiled down to: "A law, immigrants found..." -- "A law..." now seems to modify "immigrants." In other contexts, it might be okay to use "a law" as modifier (i.e. "A law passed in 1964, the Civil Rights Act changed the course of American history."), but in this case it doesn't make any sense, since immigrants are certainly not "a law".

One final problem with (C) is that "holding" seems to modify "a United States citizen" (as if something is a crime only for US citizens who are holding gold!). The logical meaning is more clear in (D) with "to hold" instead of "holding".

If you have further doubts, feel free to post them on the thread for that specific question.

I hope that helps!

hello GMATNinja
I came across a SC question on GMATClub, where one of the expert eliminated options through VAN rule, can you please explain what is this rule and where and how to apply it?