Later it develops aversion both for the book and the man who le

Question

Later it develops  aversion both for the book and the man  who lent him it.

A. aversion both for the book and the man
B. aversion for the book and for the man
C. an aversion both for the book and for the man
D. an aversion both for the book and the man
E. aversion for both the book and the man

Lawana911 · Answer

Why not D? Can someone please explain?

ReedArnoldMPREP · Answer

This question is strange. I think the first 'it' is maybe supposed to be 'he?'

But the reason D is wrong is a standard GMAT parallelism error. It's one we don't care about in day to die life, but once you start noticing it is free points.

There are certain 'pairs' of words we all 'closed parallelism' markers. These are structures like 'either...or,' 'neither...nor,' 'between... and,' 'both...and.'

These are really helpful gifts, because whatever follows these markers needs to be the same kind of structure.

"He is going to the store both to buy food and to see his friend, who works as a cashier."

So 'to buy,' and 'to see' are mirrored structures. They're both 'infinitives,' and give reasons why he is going to the store.

While I wouldn't care in life, on the GMAT, this is wrong:

"He is going to the store both to buy food and visit his friend, who works as a cashier."

'to buy' and 'visit' are now NOT the same kind of word. 'To buy' is an infinitive, 'visit' is just a *verb*.

So with D, here, '...both for the book and the man,' we have a similar error. 'For the book' is a prepositional phrase, 'the man' is just a noun. I know what is meant, but the structure must be consistent. It should use either: "an aversion both for the book and for the man" or "an aversion for both the book and the man."

Parallelism is a great thing to keep an eye out for on the GMAT. Once you start seeing things like this, wrong answers jump out as obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGIxNizBWs

DmitryFarberMPrep · Answer

I'd be careful about trying to study SC from this question.

First, and most importantly, the GMAT will never present you with a sentence that relies on other, unseen sentences for its meaning. Here, we are left to ask "later than what?" and "what is it?" A correct SC sentence will not leave us asking such questions, and for that reason alone, all the choices are wrong. This is a sentence that makes perfect sense  in the context in which it was presented,  but that makes no sense on its own. After all, in the context of a dialogue, "Yes" is also a valid sentence, but it's not going to be the answer to an SC. (That's a shame, really--I would love to write a one-word SC that actually worked!)

Second, "lent him it" is not likely to fly on the GMAT. It isn't grammatically incorrect, but it's a dialectical usage that I believe is more common in UK and Indian English than in US English. I searched for this text and found that it comes from a humorous essay by the great R.K. Narayan. His mastery of the language is certainly well-established, but this isn't a usage we'd be likely to see in a GMAT answer, correct or otherwise.

Also, the question as written omits a crucial word from the original text that makes the meaning a bit more clear: "Later it develops  into  an aversion both for the book and the man who lent him it." The "it" in question is the attitude of a man to whom the author has lent a book. In fact, when I look at the original passage, I still don't ever see a single noun, such as "attitude," that serves as an antecedent for "it." This is another crucial difference between real-world writing and SC. In writing, especially literary writing, a sentence is correct as long as it conveys what the author wants it to convey. On the GMAT, we are a bit more rule-bound and need a clear antecedent for every pronoun.

So by all means, read great literature, but don't try to extract SC directly from that literature, especially on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

udaypratapsingh99 · Answer

Can someone explain why E is wrong?
My hypothesis was that there are 2 objects - the book and the man- therefore, the use of "an" might be inappropriate.

Later it develops aversion both for the book and the man who le

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Later it develops aversion both for the book and the man who le

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