ravigupta2912
Hi Andrew, is the "," before "while" in D correct? IMO, it is artificially separating the sentence into two clauses (IC and DC) which kinda confused me since dependent clause usually comes before an IC. Not to mention that E conveyed things slightly more clearly and hence I also went with E.
Hello, Ravi. Yes, the comma is fine. This is a compound sentence in which
while is used as a coordinating conjunction, so in effect, it serves in the same capacity as
but. You can see such usage in one of the sample sentences under the entry for
while in the Cambridge Dictionary (found
here):
Tom is very outgoing, while Ken’s shy and quiet.As for (E), and to touch on the concern of
Gknight5603 at the same time, yes, it is more explicit than (D) in spelling out the comparison, but all the crucial elements are there in (D), as I explained above. There would be no need to bring Quant into the picture when only the Verbal section has been mentioned. That is, the comparative
study much more has a single touchstone earlier in the sentence—
with little preparation—and since the preparation in question is linked to scoring well on the Verbal section of the GMAT, we do not need to make an extra reference to
time. The comparison is between [less] preparation and [more] preparation, not between preparation and time
per se.
I have said this often in the forum, and it bears saying again: you can only treat the non-underlined portion as gospel in a Sentence Correction question. Since the entire sentence is underlined here, we cannot point to the original sentence for guidance as to what the sentence means to say.
Time there is just as extraneous.
I hope that helps clarify any concerns. Good luck with your studies.
- Andrew