Hello GMATNinja,
Your explanations to any of the Verbal questions are the best .I have been preparing for GMAT from quite a time now (ON & Off lately). But i have decided to prepare for it and get over it by March end. I need a lil help for someone who's preparing for it upon their own-
1)how to make a complete week-wise study plan so I have the total topics covered in sight & planned Judiciously.
2)I am looking forward to score a 720+ on GMAT and I feel i am more confident about scoring more on verbal than quant unlike Indian applicants.

Kindly Help.Thanks a Ton In advance ..Cheers!!

Please don't lose even a moment of sleep over this question, warrior1991. It's a non-official question that has significant flaws, so please don't interpret it as a bellwether for the actual GMAT at all. Just keep moving.
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Huma2703, sorry for my slowness -- I should have tagged you when I responded to a similar question above.

Check out the bottom of this post for a brief -- and probably unsatisfying -- discussion of the word "with" on the GMAT.

And there's no rule that says that you couldn't start a sentence with the word "with." For example, it would be fine to say "I ate 400 dosas with great enthusiasm." The phrase "with great enthusiasm" just modifies the previous verb phrase, "I ate 40 dosas." But there's no reason why we couldn't flip it: "With great enthusiasm, I ate 400 dosas." I personally wouldn't choose to write the sentence that way, but technically speaking, there's nothing wrong with it -- and there are plenty of far more important things to worry about on the GMAT.

I hope this helps!
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Sentence correction
When to use contribute and when to use contributes?

Posted from my mobile device

GMATNinja sir,
I've got queries regarding the following question:

A group of students in an American village has been selected for testing a new low-cost electronic notepad being built around a new class of green, power-stingy microchips that use a fraction of the electricity of current computer chips.

A. has been selected for testing a new low-cost electronic notepad being built around a new class of green, power-stingy microchips that use a fraction of the electricity of current computer chips

B. have been selected to test a new low-cost electronic notepad being built around a new class of green, power-stingy microchips that use a fraction of the electricity used by current computer chips

C. has been selected to test a new low-cost electronic notepad to be built on a new class of green microchips, which are also power-stingy and which use a fraction of the electricity used by current computer chips

D. have been selected for testing a new low-cost electronic notepad being built around a new class of green, power-stingy microchips that use a fraction of the electricity of current computer chips

E. has been selected to test a new low-cost electronic notepad being built around a new class of green, power-stingy microchips that use a fraction of the electricity used by current computer chips

I had selected option B instead of E for the following reasons:
'Group of students' is singular BUT 'A group of students' must be plural so 'have been' will come, isn't? On the other hand, if the question stem was either 'The group of students' or 'group of students', it would have been singular and hence we would have used 'has been'.

Where am I going wrong?


Similarly, there's another question which is confusing:

The majority of patrons of the local library, though enthusiastic about a new book mobile service, is unable, or either unwilling , to volunteer time to staff it.

A. is unable, or either unwilling
B. is either unable or unwilling
C. are unable, or either unwilling
D. are either unable or unwilling
E. are unable or unwilling, either way

I'm confused between B and D, because 'The majority' will be singular.

P.S: Sir, sorry for such long post.

Thank you for the kind words, @Shrindhi! Glad to hear that the explanations are helping.

I'm not sure that you're going to love my response to your questions, though. Honestly, there's no one-size-fits-all weekly study plan that I could recommend with a straight face. We don't even offer that sort of thing to our private students -- we basically evaluate their skills and weaknesses every week, and adapt their study plans constantly. So I can't offer a study plan that will definitely work over the next few months to achieve any specific goal for any specific person. Everybody is different, so everybody needs a different approach to their studies.

But I can recommend a few resources that might help you figure out what works best for you:

• A YouTube video we did called "Becoming your own GMAT tutor." Slides are available here if you want them.
• Check out bb 's 2018 study plan, with a lot of general advice to help you design your own plan of attack
• And this is a verbal-only study plan from a GMAT Club legend... but again, it's fairly broad, and is designed to help you figure out what works best for YOU.

I hope this helps a bit!
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Hi GMATNinja


The controversy has divided the Senate, causing strains in the commission, provoking public charges by industry officials that the banking chief is overreaching his authority, and private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”

A.causing strains in the commission, provoking public charges by industry officials that the banking chief is overreaching his authority, and private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”
B.causing strains in the commission and provoking public charges by industry officials that the banking chief is overreaching his authority, with private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”
C.caused strains in the commission, and provoked public charges by industry officials that the banking chief is overreaching his authority and that private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”
D.caused strains in the commission, provoked public charges by industry officials that the banking chief is overreaching his authority and private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”
E.caused strains in the commission, and provoked public charges by industry officials that the banking chief is overreaching his authority and private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”

This is one of the veritas prep questions.
But I found this question difficult because I could not understand the meaning of the sentence properly.
What I understood:
The controversy divided the senate
Result:1. Led to strains in commission
2. provoked public charges and private complaints.
The subject, controversy, is responsible for the actions. Hence the actions agree with the subject.
Hence these results make sense.

SO apart from the non existing conjunction "and", I couldn't find any error in this sentence.


In option b:
that the banking chief is overreaching his authority, with private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”
the "with private complaints" implies that the banking chief is overreaching his authority with private complaints.
I BELIEVE THIS IS ILLOGICAL MEANING AND NOT CHANGE IN MEANING.
HENCE THIS OPTION IS INCORRECT.

IN option C, D and E, there is a change of meaning. Now I am comfortable with a change in meaning because the other options do not make sense.
But if an option stated:

causing strains in the commission, AND provoking public charges by industry officials that the banking chief is overreaching his authority, and private complaints that he is “reckless” and “stubborn.”

Would this them be correct and preferred over the the correct option E which states that the controversy did 3 things?


Thank you in advance for your help.

Regards
Nitesh

saurabh9gupta, I might be too late to be useful for you, but there’s a full article about the use of being here. And you can read a lengthy discussion about “having” in this post.

Sorry for my slowness, and I hope that these help!
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Sorry saurabh9gupta, I should have answered this with the last one:

Honestly, I’ve never spent even a moment thinking about that construction (until now, anyway!), and I can't think of a reason why noun + preposition + participle would be wrong.

It doesn’t seem like something worth worrying about, but for whatever it’s worth, I can't think of a correct usage of it. (Though there are plenty of cases when you would use noun + preposition + gerund, which looks like the same thing. There's nothing wrong with the phrase "a champion in swimming" or "the pain of studying excessively" -- but in both cases, the "-ing" word is functioning as a noun, so it's a gerund, and not a participle.)

Actually, I'm not even sure why it would be a concern, and that probably means that I'm failing to think of an example of it that appears on the GMAT. Do you have something specific in mind? If so, let me know. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's worth losing sleep over...
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I'll start with the same comment as in my last post on this thread: this is a non-official question, and non-official questions aren't generally worth your precious study time for verbal. They're fine for quant, but will eventually lead you astray on verbal.

And in this particular case? Honestly, I don't think it's worth your time at all. For a vaguely similar issue, you might check out this classic question about a sloth.
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