nahid78 wrote:
Hello.
mikemcgarry,
Another one...
I was hesitating between C and E.
I couldn't find meaning differences between them, and picked C. As I found it concise.
Why is C wrong?
Thanks again.... and again...
Dear
nahid78,
I'm happy to respond.
Here's the question with (C) & (E).
The Sports Medicine Programs of the Olympic Training Center, a complex where final tryouts are held for athletes representing the United States in the Olympics, is geared toward enhancing athletes' performance and toward their preparation for international competition.
C) are geared to enhance athletes' performance and their preparation
E) are geared toward enhancing the performance of athletes and preparing themPart of this is the parallelism and part of this is the idiom.
In the original, notice there are two actions
(1)
enhancing athletes' performance(2)
their preparationThe prompt does not do a good job of presenting those two in parallel. Choice (E) does an excellent job of putting them in parallel, whereas (C) changes their relationship--in (C), the action of "
enhancing" applies to both parts, "
athletes' performance and their preparation." This is a small change to the meaning.
Also, when the verb "
gear" is used metaphorically, it idiomatically takes the preposition "
toward." The construction "
geared toward" sounds natural, whereas the construction "
geared to" sounds awkward. I want to emphasize that this is an idiom that appears relatively infrequently--one might take 100 GMATs in a row and never see a question involving this particular idiom.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
I have a doubt in C. I think 'their' is properly referring to athletes here as possessive pronoun can refer to possessive noun. Please confirm.