Usage of the idiom - as

Definitely! "They worked as a sketch artist" is false because the pronoun is plural while "a sketch artist" is singular.
"They worked as sketch artists" is correct.

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Need Kudos

Dear mischiefmanaged,

My friend, whenever you ask a question about a specific sentence in a specific book, always always always give the page number and cite the exact source, including volume & edition.

It appears that this sentence is wrong because of a pronoun singular/plural mismatch. Were they presenting it as a pronoun problem or as an idiom problem with the preposition "as"? I would have to see the exact context before I could comment on what they are saying.

Does all this make sense?

Mike
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Hi mike,

I am referring to manhattan SC 6th edition guide 8, page number: 141, topic: as.
By looking at the sentence, even I understood that the error is singular/plural mismatch. But, i was unsure why that was it mentioned in idioms chapter.

Please help.
Thank you in advance.


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Dear mischiefmanaged,

I'm happy to respond.

Yes, that is a little unusual. Yes, the problem is 100% the singular/plural mismatch: that's precisely why it's wrong, and they say as much in the parenthetical mark following the sentence.

I may be assuming here, but I think they were trying to make a subtle point about the nature of that idiom. You see, if we have a sentence of the form A is/are B, that is a kind of "equation" between A and B, and obviously there has to be matching between A and B on a number of levels (singular/plural, logical, etc.) Well, the idiom A [verb] as B is also a kind of equation, and in similar fashion, there needs to be matching between A and B in this case as well. Certainly A and B have to match in terms of singular & plural, and there has to be a basic logical congruence to the roles. A sentence of the form "My horse worked as a plumber" is entertaining and humorous, and may be typical of, say, a whimsical children's book, but of course, such a sentence would not come within a 100 miles of the GMAT SC. On the GMAT, A and B must be strictly logically compatible.

Those folks at MGMAT are very smart. That's my guess about why this odd point appears right there in the idiom chapter.

Mike
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Thank you so much, Mike


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