During the tenure of Steve Jobs, which was memorable as much for his

This one is tricky! (And apologies to anybody who saw a version with some discrepancies between the original underlined portion and answer choice (A). The problem has been fixed.) If you get too mechanical with the word "which", you can get yourself into trouble here, especially if you're not paying obsessively close attention to the meaning of each of the answer choices.


“Which” can’t modify a person, so you might automatically think that this one is wrong, since “which” seems to be modifying “Steve Jobs.” But as we discussed in our long-winded article about the many uses of “that” on the GMAT, it can be perfectly OK for a noun modifier (“that” or “which”, for example) to “reach behind” a prepositional phrase. So (A) is saying that “the tenure of Steve Jobs” was memorable for a couple of different reasons. That seems fine.

But there’s a different problem: “the growth of Apple exceeded any large technology company.” Nope. We can’t really compare the growth of Apple to “any large technology company.” (A) is out.


There’s a nice, clear parallelism error here: “both for his dictatorial management style and his groundbreaking product innovations.” “Both” is followed by a prepositional phrase, and “and” is followed by a noun, and that’s not OK. (B) is gone.


I guess I’m OK with the modifier beginning with “who”, though I think it would make more sense if we modify the entire phrase “tenure of Steve Jobs”, instead of just Steve Jobs. But I guess it’s not DEFINITELY wrong to use “who” here.

The bigger problem is that the comparison at the end is just a tiny bit off. "That" is a singular pronoun referring back to "the growth", so then we have: “…the growth of Apple exceeded {the growth of} any technology company in the world.” This is subtle as hell, but Apple’s growth didn’t exceed the growth of any technology company – it exceeded the growth of any other technology company. Nasty! (And here’s an official question that has a similar issue, in case you think we’re inventing weird stuff.) So (C) is out.


As mentioned in (C), I’m not crazy about the use of “who” here, but again, I’m not sure that it’s wrong. The comparison at the end of the underlined portion is definitely wrong, though: it’s literally saying that Apple itself exceeded every other tech company, and that doesn’t make sense. (D) is gone.

Crap, I hope we like (E).


Not bad! The phrase beginning with “which” correctly modifies “the tenure of Steve Jobs”, and that makes sense. And the comparison is finally better: “the growth of Apple exceeded {the growth of} any other large tech company…” That works. (E) is the answer.