The writer Katherine Mansfield produced a body of work with a number o

The writer Katherine Mansfield produced a body of work with a number of titles greater than James Joyce but only half the total number of pages, as many of her pieces are short stories while his are dense novels.

A) with a number of titles greater than James Joyce but only half the total number of pages, as many
This is an incorrect comparison between Katherine Mansfield's body of work and James Joyce (as a human).

B) containing more titles than James Joyce had, but Katherine Mansfield wrote only half the total number of pages, and many
The original sentence intends to use the "many....novels" clause to express the rationale. "Had" also isn't necessary here.

C) containing a number of titles that is greater than James Joyce's, but hers had only half the total number of pages, as many
We finally get the possessive right here but...."a number" and "is" is not the right verb agreement!

D) comprising more titles than the work of James Joyce, but consisting of only half the total number of pages, and many
Incorrect comparison between "Katherine Mansfield produced X" and "the work of James Joyce"....

E) comprising more titles than that produced by James Joyce but consisting of only half the total number of pages, since many
"That'' refers to "[body of work] produced by James Joyce" and is properly aligned with "Katherine Mansfield produced a body of work." The "since" adequately portrays the last clause as a cause/rationale.

E remains.
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how is B wrong "had" is making sense for comparing the title

anshulvnd5
b is wrong because it changes the intended meaning to Katherine writing only half the total number of pages for her book. But the intended meaning is even-though Katherine had more titles than that of John, her work comprised of half the number of pages when compared with John's work
I hope this helps

Can someone explain why C is incorrect?

Hi jayitaroy,

Here are a couple of ways to take option C out:

1. Think about what comes after "James Joyce's". Is it:

a. The writer Katherine Mansfield produced a body of work containing a number of titles that is greater than James Joyce's body of work...
or
b. The writer Katherine Mansfield produced a body of work containing a number of titles that is greater than James Joyce's number of titles...

Given that we want to say that the first number is greater than the second number, we can't go with (a), as it says that someone's body of work is greater than someone else's body of work (meaning error, because the a number of... bit doesn't make any sense now). Another interpretation of (a) is that the number of titles is greater than James Joyce's body of work, which is clearly not a good comparison.

In (b), it is unidiomatic to say someone's number of titles. That is, we can't say something like Agatha Christie's number of books.

2. We can also remove option C by taking a call on what her body of work contains. Option C says that her body of work contains a number of titles. A number of means ~several. That is, if we say:

A body of work containing a number of titles
we mean
A body of work containing several titles

This does not provide us an actual number that we can then say is greater than some other number.

In other words, a body of work can contain a reference to the things someone has created, but it cannot contain a reference to the number of things someone has created. We can look at this like this: "what can 'go into' a body of work?"

Body of work ← Titles, like "Book 1", "Book 2"... (this is fine)
Body of work ← Number of titles, like 10, 20, 30... (this is not okay)
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Shouldn't we have "those" in option E instead of "that" as we are comparing titles(plural).
Please help

Hi arya251294,

They're going for a body of work here, so we need to read that option like this ~"X has more {something} than Y".

1. The writer Katherine Mansfield produced a body of work comprising more titles than that produced by James Joyce...

Both a body of work and that are singular.
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Hello arya251294,

We hope this finds you well.

To answer your query, in this sentence the comparison is between Mansfield's "body of work" (singular) and Joyce's "body of work" (singular); thus, "that" is the correct pronoun, not "those".

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team
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