Many newspapers across the country, forced to cope with about half as

VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL SOLUTION:

This problem involves a Comparison, meaning that your primary role is to determine whether that comparison is Logical, Idiomatic, and Parallel (LIP).

Note that choice (B) fails the Idiomatic test: the comparison closes with the comparative "as" but there is no opening "as" to complete that structure ("as many as"). Because the comparison begins without "as" (forced to cope with about half the advertising revenue...) it would have to use "that" ("half the advertising revenue that it received...") in order to be idiomatically correct.

Choice (C) commits a Logical error within the same construction: by placing "the advertising revenue" outside the "as much ___ as" structure, the sentence is comparing 1) "half" to 2) "the advertising revenue it was receiving years ago." The "half" is never fully qualified (half of what?) and this is then an imbalanced comparison.

Choices (A), (D), and (E) commit neither of these errors, properly completing the "as much as" construction and logically comparing "half as much advertising revenue" to "as it was receiving previously." From here you should assess other decision points.

With (D), note that it breaks from using "forced to cope with" as a modifier (as the first three choices do) and instead using "have been forced" as an active verb. That then creates a Sentence Construction error when you get past the underline and reach the verb "have frantically sought." Because there is no "and" connector to separate the two actions, this sentence essentially reads "newspapers have been forced have sought" and is incorrect.

And choice (E) commits a Modifier error, as there is no noun directly following the introductory modifier "forced to cope..." - to be correct, the noun "newspapers" would have to come immediately after the comma. Instead, that portion begins with another modifier ("across the country") and is incorrect.

Choice (A) is the correct answer.

Please explain the role of

Forced

Bunuel

Forced is a verb-ed Modifier and it should be placed right next to the modifying verb.

Also, Newspapers are not coping with anything its the company that manufactures newspapers is.

Please correct me where am I going wrong?

VeritasKarishma
quixx23
VeritasPrepBrandon
VeritasPrepBrian
VeritasPrepHailey
VeritasPrepRon

Check out this post on participles: https://www.gmatclub.com/forum/veritas-prep-resource-links-no-longer-available-399979.html#/2014/1 ... -the-gmat/

The example discusses a scenario just like this - the past participle modifier is not directly after the noun it modifies. Nevertheless, it is correct.
Here too, there is no better place to put the other modifier "across the country". So even if the participle modifier is not directly next to the noun "newspapers", it is obvious what is being modified and is correct.

Also, there is nothing wrong with newspapers receiving less revenue etc. They stand for the brand/organization as a whole. If I say the New York Times is struggling, it means the brand as a whole.

KarishmaB AnthonyRitz HaileyCusimano AndrewN AjiteshArun
Having some trouble with this question, I would appreciate your feedback.
I did narrow down this question to A and E, but ultimately chose E. A seemed more problematic than E because:
1) In answer choice A, the modifier after the comma "Forced to cope with about half as much advertising revenue..." could reasonably be interpreted to modify the noun "country" because it makes some sense that a country could be forced to cope with less revenue (for example in terms of advertising tax revenue). The other correct interpretation is that the "forced..." modifier modifies "newspapers" as seems to be the intent of the sentence. Because of this ambiguity, I preferred E over A.
2) More importantly, in answer choice E, I don't really see the harm of having a prepositional modifier "across the country" before the noun "newspapers." To me, modifiers "across the country" and "forced to cope with about half as much advertising revenue..." are both clearly modifying "newspapers" because the introductory modifier cannot be reasonably interpreted to modify "across the country." Now I do understand that when you start a sentence with an -ed modifier, the general rule is to have the subject of the sentence come immediately after the comma, but is that a hard rule? In fact, as I was making a final decision on this question, I thought to myself that eliminating E because the subject didn't immediately come after the comma was a clever trap.

Sambon - I understand the problem.

Note that logic ensures that there is no ambiguity in (A)

Many newspapers (plural) across the country (prepositional modifier), forced to cope ... as they were (plural) ...

We know that "forced to cope ..." is certainly referring to "newspapers".

The prepositional modifier (across the country) defines the newspapers. Which newspapers? It is similar to
Many newspapers in Tanzania, forced to cope ... etc

The whole phrase "Many newspapers in Tanzania" are the ones being forced to cope. Without "in Tanzania" we don't even know which newspapers are the subject of our discussion. Newspapers in US? Newspapers across the world?

Hence (A) is perfectly correct.


(E) introduces some problems.

Prepositional phrases that define the noun usually appear after the noun.
It's awkward to say "I have an in the city apartment" instead of "I have an apartment in the city."

Also, (E) implies that ALL "across the country newspapers" have been forced to cope with less revenue. But all other options say "many newspapers have been forced to cope" which is much more likely the correct interpretation. When we are talking about the financial situation being faced by an industry, it makes more sense to use the generic "many" instead of implying that it is true for every player in the industry until and unless we specifically mention "every newspaper" etc.

Hence (A) is a much better choice.

Hello, Sambon. I am satisfied with the response KarishmaB has provided above, so I will only add that there are few "hard rules" concerning modifiers. You should look to contextual clues—meaning—to guide your hand, as well as general usage. I can think of a few examples of official questions in which either phrase/clause stacking occurs ahead of the main clause (known as left-branching in linguistics) or the verb-ed modifier does not touch the noun it modifies. Take a look at the following somewhat unorthodox SC questions—all official—for additional practice:

1) Beatrix Potter, in her book illustrations... (LINK)

2) Initiated five centuries after Europeans... (LINK)

3) According to the space agency... (LINK)

Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

KarishmaB

Thank you for a great response. Your identification of additional issues in E and clarification of answer A made clear why answer choice A is the better answer.

I had a follow up on the first part of your explanation because I struggled with this concept a few times. Say, I had the following sentence, instead, in which it’s much less likely that the first noun is modified by the “-ed” modifier:
“Many postal workers across the country forced to cope with half as much advertising tax revenue as they did last year lost their jobs.”

I know it’s not all that helpful to look at a single, made-up sentence in a vacuum but I am just trying to nail down this concept. In the example sentence, the meaning of the sentence dictates that it makes more sense that “forced to cope…” modifies “country” and not “postal workers” because the possibility of postal workers receiving advertisement tax revenue is pretty much nonexistent. But at the same time, we have a clue with the plural pronoun “they” indicating that the modifier “forced to cope…” should modify “postal workers.” Since meaning seems to take precedence in this case, would I then be eliminating this example sentence as an answer choice because the pronoun “they” doesn’t agree in number with “country?”

Besides my question, my takeaway from this example is that if you have two nouns that can both reasonably be interpreted to be modified by an “-ed” modifier but a pronoun clue in the rest of the sentence clearly points to one noun over the other, we can confidently say that there is no modifier ambiguity.

Posted from my mobile device

Hello Sambon,

We hope this finds you well.

Having gone through the question and your query, we believe we can help resolve your doubt.

The real error in your sentence is that "forced to cope..." will modify the main noun of the noun phrase that it modifies, and that noun phrase is "Many postal workers across the country", whose main noun is "postal workers". Thus, in the construction, you have put together, "forced to cope..." unambiguously and incorrectly refers to "postal workers" rather than to "country". The plural "they" being used to refer to "country" is a separate error.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team

Sambon

There are lots of problems with the sentence you have shared.
"Many postal workers across the country" - Our subject of interest is "postal workers". We are modifying that by saying "postal workers all over the country". After this, we will likely talk about postal workers.
A non essential modifier (within commas) for 'the country' will be a distraction to the sentence.
An essential modifier (defining modifier without commas) could make sense in certain situations such as
"Many postal workers across the countries facing recession are ..."
"facing recession" defines the countries about which we are talking.


First and foremost, we need to formulate an idea. This idea is what we want to tell the reader. Then we create a sentence to communicate that idea in the best possible way.

I am unable to understand the idea here:
“Many postal workers across the country forced to cope with half as much advertising revenue as they did last year lost their jobs.”

If I am modifying postal workers with "forced to cope ..." it is non-essential modifier so should be in commas. Also, how can the country or the postal workers cope with advertising revenue? Newspapers, magazines, TV channels etc run advertisements for brands and hence generate advertising revenue. Why would postal workers or a country get advertising revenue?

All in all, try to understand the structure of the sentence - what is it that the sentence wants to tell you. After that, consider the best possible presentation from the given 5 options.

as much "x " as "y".
x and y should be parallel ,,, but here they are not ... that is why I selected option b over a.
can someone explain where I got wrong