The professor's consistent late arrival is offset

I see a few queries about this one, so I will offer my thoughts in an effort to assist the community.


The problem is that consistent and late are both acting as adjectives that are modifying arrival. Is it a problem that the professor is arriving on a consistent basis? No. We cannot argue that the former adjective is modifying the latter either, since we would expect to see an adverb instead.


This is a worse version of (A), adopting a prepositional phrase when a possessive works just fine, but the double adjective issue remains.


Now, an adverb properly modifies the adjective late. If the professor were late once or perhaps every once in a while, there might not be a problem, but his consistently late arrival gets in the way of his remarkable lectures. There is nothing to argue against here, which is why we have a compelling reason to select it.


It is hard to know where to begin with this one. By separating late and arrival from earlier answer choices, we now have a sentence that conveys an entirely different notion, namely that it is a problem that of late, or recently, the professor has been arriving consistently. I guess we are meant to think that sporadic appearances would be better. This nonsensical distortion of the sentence is good for a chuckle, nothing more.


Not only do we see the same problematic adjective pop up in consistent, but we also get arriving at the tail-end of the underlined portion, and the action of arriving, whether late or on time, is better described as an arrival (similar to how we would say we were up for a renewal of a license, not a renewing).

That is really all there is to this one. It can be useful to think of SC as a task in which the goal is to disprove all the answers. The one that you have the hardest time debating is the one you should choose.

I hope that helps. If anyone has further questions, I would be happy to help out. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

I've a doubt in the OA, I'll tell that once someone starts post their explanation.

Adjectives can modify only nouns and Adverbs can modify anything say verbs, adjectives, adverbs or even clauses except nouns and pronouns.
So I don't think we will ever go wrong if we stick with the above rules blindly. But, its always better to use those rules
to preserve the author's intent. Nowadays, Meaning plays a far important role in GMAT SC. If possible, try to go through the article by Magoosh instructor(in Gmat Experience thread) on how the SC has become reliant on meaning these days.

Let's take a look at this example.

"We have more efficient engines" - more can be used as an adjective or an adverb .
--> Does the author mean highly efficient engines? [Adjective + Adjective + Noun]
--> or Does he mean more number of efficient engines? [Adverb + Adjective + Noun]

In the above case, both rules seem valid. So it's always better to understand the author's intent and then use the rules to reflect the intended meaning.

Thanks again Ronaldo. I'm pretty clear with what you stated above. : -)

Remove D & E because arriving is a verb and not an action noun.
Remove A & B because consistent is not correct in this sentence.

By elimanation C is the correct answer:

C) The professor's consistently late arrival

What is the source of this question? I do not believe that the OA is correct. "His" has no antecedent.

Even I too had the same doubt. But could find the below info in this thread. It does makes sense to me. Agree? Coming to the source, I found this question in 800score.com.

--> The possessive noun "professor's" is correct as long as we refer back only using possessive noun "his".
We would have been forced to change the construction only if we had a reference back to professor as a noun (i.e him, he etc..)

can someone please help with this question?

The consistent late arrival of the professor