What the eye sees, if it is at all different from what the brain

What the eye sees, if it is at all different from what the brain visually perceives, then this distinction is, for practice purposes, meaningless.

What the eye sees has no role here.

(B) It is meaningless, for practical purposes,to take what the eye sees and make it different from what the brain visually perceives.
here we are not making anything and this plays the spoilsport giving incorrect meaning.

(C) For practical purposes, it is a meaningless distinction to make what the eyes sees different than what the brain visually perceives.
we are not making what the eyes see..................spoilsport

(D) The distinction of what the eye sees from what the brain visually perceives is, for all practical purposes, meaningless.
Simple and correct.

(E) What the eye sees, being different from what the brain visually perceives is, for practice purposes,meaningless.
what the eye sees is meaningless is not the intended meaning.

I hurried after filtering the options to A and D and selected A.
Takeaway: Don't hurry looking at the timer.

Can you elaborate a little on B? "Colloquial" is kind of vague for non native speakers like me.

The intended meaning of the sentence is as follows:

The eye sees something and the brain visually perceives something different - this difference is meaningless for practical purposes.

The option B conveys a different meaning altogether:

The eye sees something and then someone makes that "something" different from what the brain perceives. It seems that making this change is voluntary and done deliberately so that the brain visually perceives something different. Thus the intended meaning of the sentence is distorted.

Dear miushock,
I'm happy to respond.

I can understand how this would be difficult for a non-native speaker to appreciate. The first order of business when learning English is to learn how people speak it---to be able to communicate, for example, with ordinary Americans. In that process, one learns a certain amount of colloquial English. Once one has mastered the basics of English and is able to communicate clearly as you do, then there is the more difficult problem of discerning well-spoken English from colloquial English. The GMAT is incredibly sophisticated and well-spoken in its standards, so that something glaringly colloquial would be out of place.

How does one master this distinction? By developing a daily habit of sophisticated reading. Read the most academic, formal, sophisticated writings you can find. See this blog article:
How to Improve your GMAT Verbal Score
There is no shortcut to make this leap. You have to do the hard work of fighting through the sophisticated reading every day. By doing so, you will develop an "ear" for formal writing, and anything more purely colloquial will more readily seem out of place.

The construction I used in (B) is a very informal colloquial construction:
"to take" [something abstract] "and make it" X
For example, a teenager might say
"He takes his problems and makes them mine!"
This would not sound out of place among young or uneducated people, but this is most certainly not how the same information would be communicated in more formal language. A somewhat more formal way to say this would be:
"He seems to think that it is my responsibility to address his problems."
That would be a somewhat fancier way to say the same thing, certainly not colloquial sounding. Even more sophisticated:
"He labors under the misapprehension that I bear some responsibility in addressing the difficulties of his own creation."
This last one would sound extremely out of place in a high school environment, because teenagers are never this formal and sophisticated with one another.

Does all this make sense?
Mike

Dear sayantanc2k,
Actually, my friend, I would say that the meaning is: the action of the eye and the action of the brain (specifically, the visual cortex) are indistinguishable. It's not that we have one experience in our eye and another in our brain: it's all one seamless experience, which is precisely why the distinction is meaningless.
Does this make sense?
Mike

That was well explained in almost exhaustive details, thank you for that.

However the development process you described of one's language nature does not apply to many non native speakers like me, and this was exactly the reason I asked this question. A non native speaker, especially with a language background substantially different from German-English or Latin family, would never develop 'ears' in the such stages. What you described was a process reflects a co-development of both language maturity and brain/logic maturity, but the cases of non native speakers, a matured and well trained brain was utilized to tackle the problem of communication barrier. For example, many people I know dedicated significant effort to boost up their vocabulary size by, you might have guessed, memorizing dictionary (a selected list of course, typically consist of 10-20k words). To these people, their perceptions of a teenager word are frequently not so different from feeling when they hear a more sophisticated and formal version of the same word. It is not uncommon for a non native GMAT/GRE test taker to have several years of experience with academic papers or technical materials but cant converse well enough to let a native speaker understand them face to face.

Again thank you for the detailed explanation, hope what I said would be somewhat useful to you when you run into any student with such background in your career.

Dear mikemcgarry,

Many thanks for taking the time to explain. Because of the phrase "for all practical purposes", I presumed that the two experiences (of the eye and of the brain) are actually slightly different, but for practical purposes, it is meaningless to make the distinction.

Moreover, Mike, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you personally - your blogs on Magoosh website and Gmatclub website contributed significantly to my V47 score, and I am happy that I can express my gratitude to you personally.

Dear nehajain1234,

You originally posted this question inexplicably in this thread:
biographer-david-mccullough-presented-an-in-depth-study-of-harry-s-tr-186502.html#p1762142

This is the correct place for a discussion of this question.

I would say that to assert that a distinction is meaningless completely trumps the question of whether there is a distinction in the first place. If I ask, "Is A different from B?" and someone answers, "Even if A were different from B, no one on Earth would be able to tell the difference! Such a distinction would be meaningless!"--then that is a response that "un-asks" the question. It renders the question ineffective and without content. That is precisely what happens in this sentence: even though, there is a possibility, a question, posed, that very question is rendered null and void by the overall meaning of the sentence. Therefore, restating the sentence without that question doesn't change the meaning at all.

This is a subtle point. Does this make sense?

Mike

Hi Mike ,

Apologies for the wrong posting initially , was unaware of this thread .
Anyways , thanks much for the great explanation , this is much more clear to me now

This sentence reinforces the importance of "logic and meaning " in SC . Just read your brilliant article on substantive clauses , and finally understood the meaning of these sentences . "It" refers back to the "Whatever .." phrase and it is unnecessary to fit in that extra "It" in the middle of the apparent Subject - Verb.

Am I correct here ? Please let me know if otherwise !
Again ,thanks a lot !

Dear nehajain1234,

I'm happy to respond.

The "whatever" doesn't appear in any of the five choices here. You appear to be asking about the grammatical structure in a question different from the question in this thread. Quite frankly, i have no idea what question you mean. This time, I will challenge you to find the thread in which the question about which you are asking appears, and ask about it there.

Let me know, and I will be more than happy to answer your question.

Mike

The only possible answer is choice (D)

This one is a very beautiful question and I think the moderator should change the tag to 600-700 level question from sub-600 level.

sayantanc2k

broall

Official Explanation

This sentence expresses a very complex idea. We will example the answer choices individual.

Choice (A) is grammatically incorrect. It begins with a substantive clause, "what the eye sees", which takes the role of a noun, but then this noun has no role in the sentence. We would expect a substantive clause at the beginning of a sentence to be the subject of some verb, but this noun-like structure has no verb. This is incorrect.

Choice (B) is far too colloquial and casual. The structure "take P and make it Q" is common in American colloquial English, but it is unacceptable in the formalism of the GMAT.

Choice (C) employs an empty "it" --- "it is a meaningless …" This structure could be used for emphasis, but there's no reason for that emphasis here. Furthermore, a "distinction" to make something "different" is redundant. This would never fly on the GMAT. This is incorrect.

Choice (D) is elegant and has no problems. It very effectively communicates this complicated idea.

Choice (E) is horrible --- "being different from" is a disastrous construction that never could be correct on the GMAT. Furthermore, what this version says, essentially is "what the eye sees is meaningless", which is most definitely not what the sentence is trying to say.

The only possible answer is choice (D).

Why is 'distinction of' correct? Shouldn't the correct usage be 'distinction between'?

if "different than" is incorrect, what is the correct idiom?
also one more questions: I thought what is in between two comma is never vital to the sentence. But here I feel "for all practical purposes" is vital. Do you have an explanation for this?

Is there a way to eliminate option (A) logically and not going into grammar.
What I think the of the question sentence is trying to convey is this ' what the eye sees if at all there is any difference from what the brain percieves ,then this distinction is meaningless.
What is wrong with that sentence?

The grammar and the logic go hand in hand here. The phrase "what the eye sees" is a noun (or noun clause), and it can be used as the subject of a sentence (e.g., "What the eye sees IS very different than what the ear hears.").

The problem with (A) is that this noun clause doesn't have a verb. The first "is" goes with "it" ("if it is..."), and the second "is" goes with "distinction" ("this distinction is meaningless"). This leaves the reader wondering what the heck that first noun clause is doing in the sentence. If it's the subject, what's the verb? If it's not the subject, what is it? This makes the meaning unclear and hard to follow in (A).

(D) fixes that problem by using "distinction" as the subject and putting "what the eye sees" in a modifier that describes the "distinction": "The distinction is meaningless." What distinction? The distinction of what the eye sees from what the brain visually perceives.

I hope that helps!