PiyushK wrote:
In 1973 mortgage payments represented twenty-one percent of an average thirty-year-old male's
income; and forty-four percent in 1984A. income; and forty-four percent in 1984
B. income; in 1984 the figure was forty-four percent
C. income, and in 1984 forty-four percent
D. income, forty-four percent in 1984 was the figure
E. income that rose to forty-four percent in 1984
Source:
OG-10
Dear Mike,
Could you please help me fine tune concepts to use elliptical construction. I tried to solve above question and selected option C, but that was not the OA.
I would like to know up to what extent we can elide information and what rules we should keep in mind while testing an elliptical part. OA says C is too much elliptical
.
Dear Piyush,
I'm happy to respond.
First of all, here's a blog I have written on this topic:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/dropping-c ... -the-gmat/Let me say, as official questions go, this is not the sharpest, and I completely understand why this question did not make the cut to our more recent editions.
The rough rule is: in the second branch of parallelism, we can eliminate any and all repeated words, that is, words repeated from the first branch of parallelism, IF dropping these words does not create any ambiguity. The only thing that would limit how many words we could drop would be if the resulted shortened sentence were unclear in some way.
Choice
(C) drops all the repeated words. That's good. Does this create ambiguity? Hmmm. Maybe. In my opinion, I think it's rather obvious that percent is parallel to percent, but maybe someone could misunderstand this as a 44% increase over and above what it had been in 1973. Hmmm. I don't know. The only conceivable problem with
(C) is if someone felt we dropped so much that it creates ambiguity of some kind. I guess it's ambiguous whether there is ambiguity --- I don't know whether that falls within GMAC's definition of ambiguity, but I know GMAC doesn't like ambiguity at all. Perhaps percents lend themselves to verbal ambiguity a little more readily than do most other topics. I don't know. I find "
too much ellipsis" a weak and unpersuasive reason, in and of itself, as to why
(C) is wrong.
I suspect it was precisely concerns of this sort that led GMAC to cutting this particular question.
Those are my thoughts. Any questions?
Mike
_________________
Mike McGarry
Magoosh Test PrepEducation is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. — William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)