The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes hard to control. A. The

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes hard to control.

A. The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes

Audience is a singular noun. While the meaning of audience is that there is more than one person, grammatically audience is a singular noun. The plural form is audiences.

So here's our mistake: the singular subject audience does not agree with the plural verb are.


B. The audience in a soccer match are often

Audience is a singular noun. While the meaning of audience is that there is more than one person, grammatically audience is a singular noun. The plural form is audiences.

So here's our mistake: the singular subject audience does not agree with the plural verb are.


C. The audience in soccer matches is frequently

This answer choice corrects the original Subject Verb Agreement mistake, by changing the plural verb are to the singular verb is, to match the singular subject audience.


D. The audience in soccer matches is sometimes

Incorrect.

While this answer choice corrects the original mistake, it doesn't stop there and makes another change - replacing the original oftentimes with sometimes. This change is both unnecessary (oftentimes is not a mistake, so it shouldn't be corrected) and creates a change in meaning.


E. An audience in a soccer match is often

Incorrect.

While this answer choice corrects the original mistake, it replaces the original The with An, and changes soccer matches to a soccer match. These changes are unnecessary.

Since there's an answer choices that corrects the original mistake without making any further unnecessary changes, it is superior to this answer choice.
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Only C and E are grammatically correct, E changes the meaning
(C) is correct

How is D incorrect? It definitely changes the meaning but how do we know that it changes the meaning incorrectly.

sumitkrocks



How E is changing the meaning?
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Your goal in SC, when answer A is wrong, is not (as this "official explanation" seems to claim) to find the answer that makes "the fewest unnecessary changes" to the original. If A is wrong, the original sentence is wrong, and if an SC answer is wrong, it usually doesn't have a sensible meaning, so there's no reason to try to preserve it. There's no basis to choose between C and D here, and E looks fine too, so it's not a well-conceived question. And when the official explanation says "oftentimes is not a mistake", that might technically be true, but you'd almost always want to replace that word with "often", which is shorter and means the same thing. You also can't use the preposition "in" in this sentence at all, so every answer choice is wrong; you can talk about the audience at a soccer game (among other possibilities), but unless the audience is actually taking part in the soccer game, you cannot use "in" here.

There are some things in GMAT that I just keep wondering what's the point of that and why do we even need that despite of everything sounds good in that and more suitable than others. But But we should always remember we are in a GMAT land and some things will never be understood.

It was bit tough choosing between C and E but sometimes meaning and structure play a great role.

A.) are is plural. It should be is.....as audience is singular

B.) Again are....out

C.) Correct. Frequently meaning more often. It says audience is very hard to control most of the times. Meaning wise also correct.

D.) sometimes meaning less often. Also the structure is wrong. Sometimes is not a modifier.

You don't say: The audience in soccer matches is sometimes hard to control. If there was a comma before and after sometimes then that would be a modifier and hence it could have been a correct answer. But it is not and even there is a bit sentence structure issue there. Sometimes doesn't fit there at all. So D is out

E.) Very Tempting option but a trap. We don't need 'an' there just to prove an should come before audience because it is a vowel. Audience is already singular and article 'The' in Option C perfectly completes a sentence with more meaningful sentence structure. So E is out


C is the answer

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