The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes hard to control. A. The

Question

The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes  hard to control.

A. The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes

B. The audience in a soccer match are often

C. The audience in soccer matches is frequently

D. The audience in soccer matches is sometimes

E. An audience in a soccer match is often

Bunuel · Answer

OFFICIAL EXPLANATION

The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes  hard to control.

A. The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes

Audience  is a singular noun. While the meaning of  audience  is that there is more than one person, grammatically  audience  is a singular noun. The plural form is  audiences .

So here's our mistake: the singular subject  audience  does not agree with the plural verb  are .

B. The audience in a soccer match are often

Audience  is a singular noun. While the meaning of  audience  is that there is more than one person, grammatically  audience  is a singular noun. The plural form is  audiences .

So here's our mistake: the singular subject  audience  does not agree with the plural verb  are .

C. The audience in soccer matches is frequently

This answer choice corrects the original Subject Verb Agreement mistake, by changing the plural verb  are  to the singular verb  is , to match the singular subject audience.

D. The audience in soccer matches is sometimes

Incorrect.

While this answer choice corrects the original mistake, it doesn't stop there and makes another change - replacing the original  oftentimes  with  sometimes . This change is both unnecessary ( oftentimes  is not a mistake, so it shouldn't be corrected) and creates a change in meaning.

E. An audience in a soccer match is often

Incorrect.

While this answer choice corrects the original mistake, it replaces the original  The  with  An , and changes  soccer matches  to  a soccer match . These changes are unnecessary.

Since there's an answer choices that corrects the original mistake without making any further unnecessary changes, it is superior to this answer choice.

sumitkrocks · Answer

Only C and E are grammatically correct, E changes the meaning 
(C) is correct

SShareef · Answer

How is D incorrect? It definitely changes the meaning but how do we know that it changes the meaning incorrectly.

rsrighosh · Answer

sumitkrocks

How E is changing the meaning?

IanStewart · Answer

Your goal in SC, when answer A is wrong, is  not  (as this "official explanation" seems to claim) to find the answer that makes "the fewest unnecessary changes" to the original. If A is wrong, the original sentence is wrong, and if an SC answer is wrong, it usually doesn't have a sensible meaning, so there's no reason to try to preserve it. There's no basis to choose between C and D here, and E looks fine too, so it's not a well-conceived question. And when the official explanation says " oftentimes  is not a mistake", that might technically be true, but you'd almost always want to replace that word with "often", which is shorter and means the same thing. You also can't use the preposition "in" in this sentence at all, so every answer choice is wrong; you can talk about the audience  at  a soccer game (among other possibilities), but unless the audience is actually taking part in the soccer game, you cannot use "in" here.

rishabh195 · Answer

There are some things in GMAT that I just keep wondering what's the point of that and why do we even need that despite of everything sounds good in that and more suitable than others. But But we should always remember we are in a GMAT land and some things will never be understood.

It was bit tough choosing between C and E but sometimes meaning and structure play a great role.

A.) are is plural. It should be is.....as audience is singular

B.) Again are....out

C.) Correct. Frequently meaning more often. It says audience is very hard to control most of the times. Meaning wise also correct.

D.) sometimes meaning less often. Also the structure is wrong. Sometimes is not a modifier.

You don't say: The audience in soccer matches is sometimes hard to control. If there was a comma before and after sometimes then that would be a modifier and hence it could have been a correct answer. But it is not and even there is a bit sentence structure issue there. Sometimes doesn't fit there at all. So D is out

E.) Very Tempting option but a trap. We don't need 'an' there just to prove an should come before audience because it is a vowel. Audience is already singular and article 'The' in Option C perfectly completes a sentence with more meaningful sentence structure. So E is out

C is the answer

Posted from my mobile device

VerbalBot · Answer

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The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes hard to control. A. The

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The audience in soccer matches are oftentimes hard to control. A. The

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