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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 03 Oct 2019, 17:04
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark, the man-eater of the movies—less than those killed by bee stings.
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(A) movies—less than those
"those" refers to a noun not present (the other people bitten)
"less" is also reserved for uncountable nouns

(B) movies—fewer than have been
correct use of "fewer", no random pronoun reference

(C) movies, which is less than those
"which" is incorrectly used as it modifies movies here
"less" is also reserved for uncountable nouns

(D) movies, a number lower than the people
a number cannot be "lower than the people" -- illogical comparison

(E) movies, fewer than the ones
same issue as A) "ones" refers to a nonexistent noun
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 28 Jan 2020, 03:28
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(B) movies—fewer than have been

My issue is with choice B, the number of people is being compared however the comparison is not very clear to me.

Should it not be something like "- fewer than the no of people who have been"
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 28 Jan 2020, 09:40
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(B) movies—fewer than have been

My issue is with choice B, the number of people is being compared however the comparison is not very clear to me.

Should it not be something like "- fewer than the no of people who have been"
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Hello manavsehgal123,

Thank you for the query. :-)

The sentence with Choice B reads: Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark, the man-eater of the movies—fewer than have been killed by bee stings.

The above-sentence is correct because it presents the intended comparison correctly. So what is the intended comparison? The sentence says that seven people have been killed by the great white shark. However, more people have been killed by bee stings.

So, the intended comparison is between the two actions of been killed - 7 have been killed by the shark while more have been killed by bee stings. The correct answer choice presents this intended comparison between the two actions. Hence, we see the usage of the verb have been killed in the second part of the comparison.

Let's try to understand what meaning will the sentence conveyed if we add the number of people who.... In this structure, the action of been killed by the shark in the first part of the sentence will be compared to the number of people. So, the sentence ends up ungrammatically comparing an action with a noun entity. Please note that who have been killed by bee stings is just a modifier/descriptor for the noun the number of people.

Hence, to compare one action with another, we must mention a proper verb in the second part of the comparison as we see in Choice B.


Hope this helps. :-)
Thanks.
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 06 Jun 2020, 23:43
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Hi experts,

Could someone please explain the role of fewer after the dash in answer choice B. I understand that fewer is an adjective and it should be describing "number of people killed by bee stings"

However, i think there is no conjunction between the 2 clauses.

First Clause: Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark
Second Clause: fewer than people have been killed by bee stings.

Whereas in answer choice D, you have the noun + noun modifier, so there is no need for a conjunction between the 2 clauses.

Could someone please explain me where am i going wrong.

Best regards,
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 30 Jun 2020, 05:35
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When we compare numbers, and numbers decrease, we can simply go back to using “less.”
• The population of Mongolia is less than that of Los Angeles.
• The cost of a night at the opera is less than total cost of a day at the ballgame.
• The melting point of zinc is less than that of copper.( BTW, “melting point” is a temperature, so it is indeed a number.)

Considering the above why cant A be correct in this case. ( It is comparing numbers and number decrease )
GMATNinja can you please clarify regarding this

I have found this topic in comparisons concept.
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 30 Jun 2020, 11:53
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renzofig The long dash is the most open-ended punctuation mark in the language, so I can understand the confusion. We can't all seem to agree on exactly how they should be used. Some people use them all the time and some people don't use them at all! The general idea is that the dash introduces some kind of break. Here are a few uses I've seen in official GMAT SC:

*Two dashes can set aside parenthetical information. In this way, it functions just like parentheses, which are--to my knowledge--never used in SC. (See how I used dashes to make a parenthetical just now? ;) )
https://gmatclub.com/forum/heirloom-tom ... ml#p570995
https://gmatclub.com/forum/each-of-hemi ... l#p2432441

*A single dash can be used to reintroduce an earlier subject, often so that we can apply a modifier. This is what we'd have if we used a dash in choice D. With a comma, we expect the appositive noun to apply to the preceding noun or noun phrase, but with a long dash we can see a bit more of a stretch.
https://gmatclub.com/forum/proponents-o ... l#p1988421

*A single dash can also introduce a modifier or fragment that applies back to something earlier in the sentence. That's what we have in A and B. The modifier "fewer" (or "less" in the wrong version) is referring back to the count of people killed.

*Sometimes a dash is used exactly where we'd expect a colon.
https://gmatclub.com/forum/yellow-jacke ... l#p2290086
https://gmatclub.com/forum/some-anthrop ... l#p1357746
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 30 Jun 2020, 11:58
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manvig You're right that we can use "less" to compare numbers or quantities, but in this case the subject isn't a number or quantity; it's seven people, so we need to go with a comparator for countable (plural) nouns.

Also, in some of the cases where people are using "less," we should use "lower." A melting point would be lower, not less, than another melting point. We aren't comparing how MUCH of something we have, but rather the point at which something happens. In any case, we often use "lower" to compare things like prices/salaries, temperatures, proportions, etc.
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 19 Aug 2020, 03:17
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GMATNinja A lot of contention is going on between B and E. Though I marked B on the basis of tense parallelism (have been), why is E wrong?
Is this the tense parallelism factor that leads to E winning over B.

I also see some great explanation by mikemcgarry ,who says both B and E are correct. But at the end of the day we have to choose one option and we must have an explanation to reject the other.
I am not getting a reason to reject E. I rejected it on the basis of my instinct.

Please enlighten.
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. :idontknow:

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

Quote:
Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark, the man-eater of the movies—less than those killed by bee stings.

(A) movies—less than those
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.

Quote:
(B) movies—fewer than have been
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).

Quote:
(C) movies, which is less than those
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.

Quote:
(D) movies, a number lower than the people
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.

Quote:
(E) movies, fewer than the ones
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.
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Big fan of your work Charles! I had a lingering question about B- I was going to pick it going by instinct but chose E instead because I thought the phrase "man eater of the movies" needed to be followed by a comma to make it a non essential modifier and ambiguity around if "fewer than have been.." is correcting modifying the right thing.

I know you've mentioned that punctuation should not be the deciding factor but here I thought the comma was important so the phrase "fewer than ..." would modify the right thing.
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 15 Sep 2020, 11:55
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Quote:
Big fan of your work Charles! I had a lingering question about B- I was going to pick it going by instinct but chose E instead because I thought the phrase "man eater of the movies" needed to be followed by a comma to make it a non essential modifier and ambiguity around if "fewer than have been.." is correcting modifying the right thing.

I know you've mentioned that punctuation should not be the deciding factor but here I thought the comma was important so the phrase "fewer than ..." would modify the right thing.
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Thank you for the kind words!

Anytime you find yourself thinking something along the lines of "I know I shouldn't do X, but maybe this time I need to!" stop and take a breath. And then don't do X. :)

As I mentioned earlier, there's no real rule about how dashes should operate. It's perfectly fine to use them the way you'd use a comma, to set off a modifier or to accentuate a point. More importantly, at some level, you knew you shouldn't be using punctuation as the final decision point! Consider the meaning instead.

Take another look at (E):

Quote:
Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark, the man-eater of the movies, fewer than the ones killed by bee stings.
Show more
First, you'll want ask yourself what "the ones" refers to. The only noun that has any hope of making sense here is "people," but if we substitute "people" in place of "the ones" we get a really strange meaning. It seems to be saying that the number of people who have been killed by sharks is fewer than the people killed by bee strings. That doesn't work. The number of people who do one activity can be fewer than the number of people who do something else, but not fewer than the other people themselves.

Because the use of "ones" creates a nonsensical meaning, we can eliminate (E).

(B) fixes the problem by cutting the phrase "the ones," and introducing the verb phrase, "have been killed." Now, because we're comparing actions, the sentence is communicating that the number of people who have been killed by sharks is fewer than the number of people who have been killed by bee stings. Looks good to me.

(Fun side note: this sentence doesn't make me any less afraid of sharks -- which are, incidentally, pretty tasty when they're cooked properly -- but does make me increasingly nervous around bees, so... mission accomplished, GMAC! :))

Because (B) is perfectly logical and (E) is incoherent, (B) is our winner. No need to agonize over a dash vs. comma.

For anybody who wants an earful (an eyeful?) about punctuation, there's a long-winded video on the topic here.

I hope that helps!
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 29 Nov 2020, 04:25
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GMATNinja A lot of contention is going on between B and E. Though I marked B on the basis of tense parallelism (have been), why is E wrong?
Is this the tense parallelism factor that leads to E winning over B.

I also see some great explanation by mikemcgarry ,who says both B and E are correct. But at the end of the day we have to choose one option and we must have an explanation to reject the other.
I am not getting a reason to reject E. I rejected it on the basis of my instinct.

Please enlighten.
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. :idontknow:

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

Quote:
Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark, the man-eater of the movies—less than those killed by bee stings.

(A) movies—less than those
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.

Quote:
(B) movies—fewer than have been
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).

Quote:
(C) movies, which is less than those
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.

Quote:
(D) movies, a number lower than the people
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.

Quote:
(E) movies, fewer than the ones
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.
Show more

Thanks! But do dashes not need to be used in pairs? I would expect to see a dash after great white shark -
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 29 Nov 2020, 12:14
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See my post above about dashes. We're not using the dash to create a parenthetical here. If we put a dash where you say, it could correctly set "the man-eater of the movies" aside as a parenthetical, but the remaining sentence would not make sense, as we'd be connecting "fewer" directly to "shark." The purpose of the single dash is to make a break in the sentence so we can reintroduce a modifier for the seven people earlier in the sentence.
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 29 Nov 2020, 19:35
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This is a great question to reinforce an important point: when in doubt, focus on basics.

We can never say that a NUMBER is less than or fewer than PEOPLE.
Maybe we say such things, but the correct answer in GMAT SC will not do so.

This one rule eliminates A, C, D, and E.
We are left only with B

Posted from my mobile device
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 05 Feb 2021, 05:03
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can we reject E on the basis that it is using ones killed by rather than have been killed by xx
AndrewN AjiteshArun
Please share your opinion on B and E.

Thanks!
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 05 Feb 2021, 08:54
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can we reject E on the basis that it is using ones killed by rather than have been killed by xx
AndrewN AjiteshArun
Please share your opinion on B and E.

Thanks!
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Most definitely, imSKR, and what you wrote as a proposed alteration is just what choice (B) offers, word for word. Simply put, ones in choice (E) leads to a muddled meaning, as explained in the Most Helpful Expert Reply by GMATNinja and a follow-up post about half a dozen replies above. I would add my own two cents, but I think ones has been squeezed dry by page four. (I was beaten to the punch.)

Thank you, nevertheless, for thinking to ask me, and good luck with your studies.

- Andrew
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 05 Feb 2021, 15:24
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can we reject E on the basis that it is using ones killed by rather than have been killed by xx
AndrewN AjiteshArun
Please share your opinion on B and E.

Thanks!
Most definitely, imSKR, and what you wrote as a proposed alteration is just what choice (B) offers, word for word. Simply put, ones in choice (E) leads to a muddled meaning, as explained in the Most Helpful Expert Reply by GMATNinja and a follow-up post about half a dozen replies above. I would add my own two cents, but I think ones has been squeezed dry by page four. (I was beaten to the punch.)

Thank you, nevertheless, for thinking to ask me, and good luck with your studies.

- Andrew
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My bad, i should have been more clear.
My meaning was: can we reject B and E on usage of tense?
B uses have been killed
E uses killed

Doesn't B makes a little more sense than E?
Please suggest AndrewN sir
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 05 Feb 2021, 18:03
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imSKR

My bad, i should have been more clear.
My meaning was: can we reject B and E on usage of tense?
B uses have been killed
E uses killed

Doesn't B makes a little more sense than E?
Please suggest AndrewN sir
Show more
Well, I hope you are not rejecting (B), since that is the answer. As such, yes, it makes more sense than (E). Would I reject (E) for its use of killed alone? Not when there is an easier target in the ones. I like to work from a place of comfort whenever possible. In a 50/50 situation, if I am uncertain about something, I put such a consideration on the back burner while I look to attack anything else in the same answer or anything at all in the other answer.

I hope that helps.

- Andrew
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 01 Jun 2021, 02:37
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I agree that the GMAT does not test us on dashes. But isn't it true that we should have a modifier in a comma pair OR in a daash pair BUT not in half-n-half i.e. , modifier -
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 03 Jun 2021, 04:21
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GMATNinja A lot of contention is going on between B and E. Though I marked B on the basis of tense parallelism (have been), why is E wrong?
Is this the tense parallelism factor that leads to E winning over B.

I also see some great explanation by mikemcgarry ,who says both B and E are correct. But at the end of the day we have to choose one option and we must have an explanation to reject the other.
I am not getting a reason to reject E. I rejected it on the basis of my instinct.

Please enlighten.
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. :idontknow:

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

Quote:
Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark, the man-eater of the movies—less than those killed by bee stings.

(A) movies—less than those
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.

Quote:
(B) movies—fewer than have been
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).

Quote:
(C) movies, which is less than those
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.

Quote:
(D) movies, a number lower than the people
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.

Quote:
(E) movies, fewer than the ones
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.
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Hi Gmat Ninja,

I had a doubt regarding this question, do you think its possible that the reason E is not the correct answer is that it makes "killed by sharks" a modifier, and B maintains the parallelism using the verb form of killed on both parts?
Also possible that the modifier removes killed by sharks from the main gist of the sentence and doesn't convey the meaning
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 04 Jun 2021, 11:03
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mahika16

Hi Gmat Ninja,

I had a doubt regarding this question, do you think its possible that the reason E is not the correct answer is that it makes "killed by sharks" a modifier, and B maintains the parallelism using the verb form of killed on both parts?
Also possible that the modifier removes killed by sharks from the main gist of the sentence and doesn't convey the meaning
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I'm not entirely sure I understand your question. If you mean that without the verb phrase, "have been," (E) appears to be creating a confusing comparison between an entity with an action -- the number of people who have been killed by sharks -- and one that is just a noun phrase with a modifier "fewer than the ones killed by bees," then yeah, I think you have a point there, particularly when we contrast this option with the crystal-clear construction we see in (B).

Just bear in mind: because "ones" doesn't make sense, and it's illogical to write that a number is fewer than people, you have some very concrete reasons to eliminate (E). Put another way, I'd rather engage with the specific logic of the sentence in front of me than grapple with abstract questions such as "am I ever allowed to compare a clause to a noun phrase?"

I hope that helps!
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Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white sha 18 Jul 2021, 00:29
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The tenses in the comparison need to be parallel as well.
And B does that.

Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark, the man-eater of the movies—less than those killed by bee stings.

(B) movies—fewer than have been

Only seven people this century have been killed by the great white shark.....................fewer than have been killed by bee stings.
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