Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha

Yeah, (B) and (E) are pretty confusing. I could swear that I'd written a long explanation of this at some point, but I think that was only in my head.

So here's that explanation that was apparently trapped in my head, QOTD-style:


I don't think anybody is tempted by this one. "Those" is a plural pronoun that logically needs to refer back to "people." So then we have "less than the people killed by bee stings" -- and that doesn't work, because "less" is a non-countable modifier, and "people" are definitely countable.

So (A) is out.


This seems fine. It sets up the comparison nicely: "seven people... have been killed by the great white shark", and that's "fewer than have been killed by bee stings." I'm not sure how we could ask for anything more from this one. Sure, you might be tempted to change this to "fewer PEOPLE than have been killed by bee stings", but it's perfectly clear without the word "people", right?

And in case you're wondering: honestly, I wouldn't waste any brain cells worrying about dashes. The world's best editors and grammar/style/usage experts don't fully agree on the correct use of dashes, and the GMAT really doesn't go crazy testing you on those nuances. More on dashes and other punctuation in this video.

Anyway, we can keep (B).


This is also an easy elimination: the phrase beginning with "which" can't logically modify "movies" or even "the man-eater of the movies", and "less than those" is wrong for exactly the same reasons as in answer choice (A). See above for more on that issue.


We beat this answer choice to death in this post, but the short version is that (D) is literally suggesting that the number is physically lower than the people. That doesn't make sense, unless there's a gigantic balloon printed with the number SEVEN on it in huge letters, and the people are skydiving above it. Or something.

So (D) is very much out.


And here's the painfully tempting answer choice. I'm not sure if you'll find this satisfying, but I'll give it a shot.

Think about what the word "ones" means: you would only use it to refer to specific cases, right? Silly example: "I eat hundreds of burritos every year, but I particularly enjoy the ones that are stuffed with avocado and carne asada." "The ones" is NOT a generic pronoun: it refers to a specific subset of burritos. You could translate "the ones" as "the specific burritos" in this case.

Mmm... burritos.

So in (E), "the ones" presumably refers to "the SPECIFIC people." And it's hard to make sense of the resulting sentence: "... fewer than the specific people killed by bee stings." The sentence is clearly trying to compare the NUMBER of people killed by sharks to the NUMBER of people compared by bee stings. And (E) simply does not do that -- it seems to be making a not-very-logical comparison between the number of people killed by sharks and the specific people killed by bee stings.

So (B) is our winner.