Although online travel sites have made the local travel agent obsolete

Hi Ujjwal, it's best to not treat while as a parallelism indicator. Hence, content before and after the while construct, need not be parallel.

For example, following sentence is correct:

Peter met with an accident while driving.

Although online travel sites have made the local travel agent obsolete, the digitization of the ticketing process in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy while the previous year’s costs were increased to double.

(A) digitization of ticketing in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy while the previous year’s costs were increased to double.

Previous year's costs can not be doubled now...costs of present time can be twice to those of previous year's....



(B) digitization of ticketing in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy while increasing costs to double those of the previous year

SV agreement is fine.... comparison is OK ... previous year's cost to this year's cost.... Correct answer....


(C) digitization of ticketing in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy as cost were increased to twice of the previous year’s

cost is not OK..... costs were increased....

(D) ticketing digitization in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy as it doubled the previous year’s costs


previous year’s costs can't be doubled now..... costs of present time can be twice to those of previous year's....




(E) ticketing digitization in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy while costs were increased to twice that of the previous year

That of is problem here ....it should have been ...those of

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MartyTargetTestPrep GMATNinja

Can you please help with this question? I could confidently eliminate only options C and E, but for the rest I'm completely clueless.

Can you please help understand what is happening in this question? For context, this appeared in today's QOTD, so I'm hopeful there is some learning intended behind this.

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(A) is fine until this part.

while the previous year’s costs were increased to double

That part conveys the nonsensical meaning that the previous years costs were somehow increased. Did the commercial bus industry have a time machine?

(D) has a similar issue. Here's (D).

(D) ticketing digitization in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy as it doubled the previous year’s costs

So, in (D) as well, the commercial bus industry somehow went back in time and "doubled the previous year's costs."

What (B) says, that digitization "reduced the average occupancy while increasing costs to double those of the previous year," makes sense since costs could be increased to double the costs of the previous year.

So, (B) is correct.

A.C.D have a grammer problem in year's, so I delete A.C.D, am I correct?

Hey T4W01

Happy to help.


There are at least a couple of standard applications of "Year's" I can think of, off the top of my head.

a. In specifying the duration of a year

For example: In a year's time

b. To denote certain things that belong to or are of a particular year

For example: This year's calendar, etc.

Hence, I would take the cautious approach and not eliminate these choices just because of "year's". I'd look for more deterministic errors in those choices.

And gauging from the excellent explanations given above, there are clearly more blatant errors in choices A, C, and D.


I hope this helps.

Best,

Abhishek

Hello T4W01,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, there is no error in the use of the possessive noun "year's"; such usage is grammatically acceptable and conveys that whatever the possessive noun refers to "belongs to" or is "from" either a particular year or a span of time equal to a year.

For example, "a year's wages" refers to the wages earned in one total year.

"last year's wages" refers to the total wages earned in the preceding year.

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

The most appropriate and grammatically correct sentence is option (B): "digitization of ticketing in the commercial bus industry reduced the average occupancy while increasing costs to double those of the previous year."

This option correctly conveys that the digitization of ticketing in the commercial bus industry caused a decrease in average occupancy. It also states that costs increased to double the costs of the previous year. The phrase "double those of the previous year" accurately compares the costs to twice the amount of the previous year.