enigma1504 wrote:
Hi
GMATNinja - Can you please break this one down for us?
is sales "of" a year acceptable in A and E ?
Notice that we get a nice juicy decision point to start. If I write, "because
of + NOUN," the noun itself is responsible for some consequence, since the preposition "of" must introduce a noun, rather than an action.
However if I write "because + FULL CLAUSE," then an action is responsible for some consequence.
Because (A), (B), and (C) contain the construction "Because of sales," they convey the idea that the sales
themselves are the reason retailers reported moderate gains in their November sales. That makes no sense. How can sales explain themselves?
In (D) and (E), we have "Because + FULL CLAUSE," and the clause, in each case, suggests that it's not the sales themselves, but the fact that they were low a year ago. This makes sense. If sales were low a year ago, we'd expect an increase if they rebounded to their former levels.
So (A), (B), and (C) are out.
Now let's look at the last two options in more detail:
Quote:
(D) Retailers reported moderate gains in their November sales, as much because their sales a year earlier had been so bad as because shoppers were getting a head start on buying their holiday gifts.
This looks pretty good. First, note the use of the past perfect "had been." We use the past perfect when an action takes place before another past event. In this case, the sales
had been bad before they
were reported. That works.
We also get a lovely parallel construction: they reported gains as much
because X as
because Y, where X and Y are full clauses. Hang on to (D).
Quote:
(E) Retailers reported moderate gains in their November sales, as much because their sales of a year earlier were as bad as that shoppers were getting a head start on buying their holiday gifts.
The phrase "sales of a year earlier were as bad as" is problematic for a few reasons. First, you can make a sale of a car, but can you make a sale of a year? At best, that's pretty confusing.
Next, (E) discards the past perfect in favor of the simple past "were as bad," even though one past action happened before another one. Is it definitively wrong? Not necessarily, but it isn't quite as clear, as the reader now has to do more work to puzzle out which action preceded the other.
And even if we argue that the first two issues aren't concrete errors, the construction "sales of a year earlier were as bad as" creates the impression that we're about to compare the sales of one year to the sales of another year. But that's not what we see. Instead we get "that" introducing a clause about shoppers. Can you figure out the intended meaning if you reread a few times? Sure, but it's certainly not as clear as what we saw in (D).
Taken together, (D) is a cleaner, more logical option than (E), so (D) is our winner.
I hope that helps!
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