The newspaper story accurately recounted the history of the colonial

Hello Everyone!

Let's tackle this question, one thing at a time, and narrow down our options quickly so we know how to answer questions like this when they pop up on the GMAT! To begin, let's take a quick look at the question and highlight any major differences between the options in orange:

The newspaper story accurately recounted the history of the colonial mansion, that it contained thirteen rooms, and that it had a reputation for being a haunted house.

A. mansion, that it contained thirteen rooms, and that it had a reputation for being a haunted house
B. mansion, that it contained thirteen rooms, and that it had a reputation of being haunted
C. mansion, that the mansion contained thirteen rooms, and said that it had a reputation for being haunted
D. mansion, said that it contained thirteen rooms and had a reputation for being a haunted house
E. mansion and said that the mansion contained thirteen rooms and had the reputation of being haunted

After a quick glance over the options, we have a few places we can focus on to narrow down our choices:

1. that it / that the mansion (pronouns & meaning)
2. that it had / said that it had / had (pronouns & parallelism)
3. for being / of being (idioms)

Let's start with #3 on our list because it's an "either/or" split. While it may seem like the phrases "had a reputation of" and "had a reputation for" are interchangeable, they are not. Deciding which one you use has to do with what comes after it:

had a reputation of X = X needs to be a verb phrase
He had a reputation of being late to class every Wednesday.
My dog has a reputation of going to the door every time I get home from work.

had a reputation for Y = Y needs to be a noun
He had a reputation for procrastination.
My cat has a reputation for nastiness.

Let's see how our options tackle this:

A. mansion, that it contained thirteen rooms, and that it had a reputation for being a haunted house
B. mansion, that it contained thirteen rooms, and that it had a reputation of being haunted
C. mansion, that the mansion contained thirteen rooms, and said that it had a reputation for being haunted
D. mansion, said that it contained thirteen rooms and had a reputation for being a haunted house
E. mansion and said that the mansion contained thirteen rooms and had the reputation of being haunted

We can eliminate options A, C, & D because "had a reputation for being" is not idiomatically correct. Now that we have it narrowed down to only 2 options, let's focus on the other items on the list. To make problems easier to spot, let's add in the non-underlined part also:

B. The newspaper story accurately recounted the history of the colonial mansion, that it contained thirteen rooms, and that it had a reputation of being haunted

This is INCORRECT because the structure of it is all wrong. It turns this into a giant list, where each item is attributed back to the verb "recounted." The newspaper didn't recount the number of rooms or the haunted reputation - it only recounted the history of the mansion. It also SAYS that the mansion has 13 rooms and might be haunted, but that's not part of the recounting. The pronouns "it" in each phrase are also problematic - it's not 100% clear if "it" is referring back to the mansion or the story??

E. The newspaper story accurately recounted the history of the colonial mansion and said that the mansion contained thirteen rooms and had the reputation of being haunted

This is CORRECT. It eliminates the vague "it" pronouns entirely, and it also clears up the "recounted" parts from the "said" parts.

There you have it - option E is our correct choice! By starting with the "either/or" split, we could eliminate 2-3 options right away, giving us more time to focus on the more intricate differences.


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