Elodie00die wrote:
Please help me with this
In another
OG question, the OA vindicates this:
‘Prices at the producer level are only 1.3 percent higher
now than those of a year ago’
And here, we have this sentence with similar structure:
'Most of the country’s biggest daily newspapers had lower circulation in the six months from...to...
than in a similar period.'
I can't see any difference between the two (except that we may not take 'a year ago' as 'a period of time'?)
If the first sentence is correct, why don't we say '....than
that in/of a similar period' here???
OG is driving me crazy
Let's start with a couple of basic examples:
"Tim has more money than Mike."
This is fine. We're clearly comparing what Tim
has to what Mike
has, and there's no need to repeat the verb for Mike.
"Tim has more money than that of Mike."
Well, the pronoun "that" must refer to "money," so this is essentially saying, "Tim has more money than
the money of Mike." This makes it sound as though Tim has, say, $500 while Mike's
money has $400. Of course that doesn't make any sense -- how can his money have money of its own?
Choice (D) has a similar issue:
"Most of the country’s biggest daily newspapers had lower circulation in the six months from October 1995 through March 1996 than the circulation in a similar period a year earlier."
It sounds like we're comparing the circulation that most of the country's biggest daily newspapers
had to the circulation that the circulation in a similar period
had. And of course that doesn't make sense, either.
The comparison we want here is more like the first of these two options:
1. "Tim ate less pizza on Friday than on Saturday."
Here, we're using the prepositional phrases ("on Friday" and "on Saturday") to compare how much pizza Tim ate on those two days. This is comparable to choice (C).
2. "Tim ate less pizza on Friday than that of Saturday."
Again, this sounds as if the
pizza of Saturday ate some amount of pizza, and that doesn't make sense (unless we're talking about
Pizza the Hutt from this ridiculous 1980's movie). This is comparable to choices (D) and (E).
The "
prices at the producer level..." question might look a bit similar, but the verbs and the comparison are entirely different.
I hope that helps!