Many teachers choose to seek employment in the suburbs

Question

Many teachers choose to seek employment in the suburbs rather than facing low
salaries in the city.

Answer:
Many teachers choose to seek employment in the suburbs rather than face low salaries in the city.

My question:
Would this work?

Many teachers choose seeking employment in the suburbs rather than facing low salaries in the city.

I guess is is more correct to say "choose to" ? does the verb choose have to be followed by "to"?

crick20002002 · Answer

"choose to " is the correct usage. You "choose to do something" rather than "choose doing something"

Crick

immaculatesahai · Answer

Hi,

Nice question. Infact I had seen more than 1 question testing these concepts on the real GMAT exam (on my previous attempt). The trick here is to realize the difference in usage of Gerunds and infinitives.

Using a gerund suggests that you are referring to real activities or experiences.
Eg. The reporter likes living in New York. (i.e. he lives in NY and likes it).

Using an infinitive suggests that you are talking about potential or possible activities of experiences. 
Eg. The reporter likes to live in New York whenever he works in the US. (i.e. he likes the option or possibility of living in NY whenever he comes to US).

Hope this helps.

miaojunmaggie · Answer

Well, I think the problem here is "rather than do sth."

pinchharmonic · Answer

Hi, great point. I never thought of the difference between gerunds and infinitives. But to clarify, are you implying that the infinitive suggests some doubt, whereas the gerund doesn't?

What if we had

"The reporter would like living in New York"
"The report would like to live in New York"

Both emphasize some doubt, but I agree the first does sound stranger than the first.

Dreaming · Answer

Also, its best to avoid -ing verb forms as much as possible unless the action in question is happenning in present continuous....

MichaelS · Answer

A little background: verb forms are different parts of speech based on verbs. For instance, the gerund  choosing , the participle  choosing  used as a modifier, the verb  choose , the infinitive  to choose , are all different verb forms.

When SC answers offer you a choice among verb forms, the question tests either parallelism or idioms. (I haven't counted, but I think that choices among verb forms rarely turn out to require attention to  both  parallelism and idioms.)

The question you refer to was--in it's original form--a question about parallelism. As another commenter, uh, commented the parallel marker  rather than  means you need to make two logically comparable elements structurally similar.

OK, but what about your alternative sentence,  Many teachers choose seeking employment in the suburbs rather than facing low salaries in the city ?

I don't think that that is idiomatic. My ear says that it's fine to choose to do something (choose to seek employment) or to choose a noun (choose a job search), but that it's not fine to choose a simple gerund (choose seeking).

A couple of important caveats: First, the GMAT is never wrong about the GMAT, including idioms. If you show me a right answer that includes  choose+simple gerund , I'm convinced. Second, verb-form idioms vary with forms of English, in a way that many other idioms do not. In particular, some uses of  -ing  words (whether continuous verbs, participles, gerunds) that are perfectly natural in Indian English are awkward and unidiomatic in American English. Since GMAC has recently announced that they no longer test "US centric" idioms, I'd be surprised to see  choose+simple gerund  tested. That's just my hunch about what "US centric" might mean, though. It's not GMAC's position, or even Manhattan GMAT's guess.

Here's Stacey Koprince's excellent blog on the subject,  https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index.php/2011/09/21/update-on-the-gmat-changes-from-larry-rudner/ .

pinchharmonic · Answer

michael, thanks for the great explanation. And yes, I randomly thought up the choose+seeking, not something I saw on a sample question or on Manhattan GMAT. Nevertheless is there a hard rule on this? Does it depend on the verb "choose?"

In the above case we have the verb form "choose", action verb, followed by either an infinitive or a gerund, and picking the infinitive is more correct. However, it seems I can't just indiscriminately apply that logic, ie. action verb + infinitive over gerund. Maybe I'm missing something here as choose may be a different type of verb?

I was thinking of other cases like the below where the meaning is totally different.

He laughs holding his belly
He laughs to hold his belly

Many teachers choose to seek employment in the suburbs

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