While market-driven competition encourages pharmaceutical companies to

I will go with B, Right Idiom is as much as so rules out C,d and E

Out of A and B as much X as Y both needs to be parallel . SO I ll go with B

I think A is much concise and better.

Lets see:
We have three times as many apples as you (have)

here verb is in ellipse.

A) marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as research (concise)

Lets look at the scope of ambiguity in above construction.

marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as marketing accounts for research (does it make sense) No.

marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as research


marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as research accounts or does
B) marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as does research (safer)

I would say this question is not a very good question, A and B both are grammatically Ok.

I would go for B, because 'accounts' is an action performed in the 1st part of the sentence that is reflected as 'does' in the next part of the sentence.

I think it's B) marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as does research , because the use of AS here is a comparison so you need a clause after AS to compare the budget of the industry with the budget of research...

Does someone knows the right answer?
Thanks!

While market-driven competition encourages pharmaceutical companies to actively seek innovative new drugs,
market analysts note that marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as research.

A) marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as research
B) marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as does research
C) the industry budget is accounted for twice as much by marketing than research
D) the industry budget is accounted for twice as much by marketing than by research
E) marketing new drugs is twice as expensive compared to research.

This is a clear comparison concept testing SC question.

While competition does X, analysts note Y.
Both X and Y should be in same voice. Since non-underlined portion of sentence is in active voice, whole sentence must follow active voice form.

options C and D are in passive form thereby violating rule of parallelism which is evident in form of words " is accounted " and "by".

both Research and marketing account for the same amount of budget. This is expressed best in option B.

A performs the classic error of comparison. It is not clear whether marketing accounts for budget or research.

E says that marketing new drugs is twice as expensive compared to research.............compared to and as expensive without as are both forms of comparison and thus redundancy is issue here.

First, eliminate C and D for saying twice as much by marketing than; E is out for distorting the original meaning. In addition, the format of 'as x as y' is not found in the choice.
Between A and B, A is wrong for comparing what marketing accounts for with research rather than what research does to match the action of marketing. B prevails.

when the element compared in in the object phrase of the first clause, ambiguity happens. if we do not add "dose", one misunderstanding is that "research" is object of the second clause

marketing accounts twice as much of budget X as budget Y.

Dear IanStewart AnthonyRitz,

There is nothing wrong with choice A. because "does" can be omitted or understood here, right?

Thank you sir!

Sure, except that A is ambiguous -- how much of research does marketing account for? I could read it that way too. See what I mean?

The rule allows us to omit and imply an element in the second half of the parallel structure only as long as no ambiguity results.

I'm inclined to agree with you - there are two potential interpretations of A:

"marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as (of) research"
"marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as (does) research"

but only the second really seems natural to me. That said, if there's a potential ambiguity in an SC question that one answer resolves and one does not, you should generally pick the answer that resolves the ambiguity. I don't think you'd see an official question exactly like this one though.

I had the same problem as @varotkorn,
normally I would have choosen B as it is nice and clear however, as I have learned that certain verbs can be omitted when there is no ambiguity I choose A, becaused I missed the second interpretation. While I now see the two interpretations I was to able to spot them by myself. Does anyone know how to spot two potential interpretations quickly?
I find this difficult because often there is only one correct way to interpret something and you don't want to spend to much time looking for something which does not exist. Here for example the first interpretation in my opinion is not logical. Marketing generally is not accounted in R&D. Of course their is research in the field of consumer behaviour but this is typically accounted directly in marketing. Therefore, I thought that there is no ambiguity. Are the rules concerning ambiguity strictly grammatical, or do they also take the logical meaning into account?

Perhaps someone who thinks more about grammatical rules will give you a more precise answer, but I'd look at it this way:

- whether there might theoretically be ambiguity is purely a grammatical issue. If comparison words are omitted, in theory, a comparison might be ambiguous.

- whether that ambiguity matters in practice, so whether we need to fix anything, is a purely semantic (meaning-based) issue that has nothing to do with grammar rules.

So if you saw a sentence like:

Karl eats more potatoes than fish.

then, in theory, the comparison is ambiguous (are we comparing how many potatoes Karl eats with how much fish he eats, or are we comparing how many potatoes Karl eats and how many potatoes fish eat?), but since, at least as far as I'm aware, fish don't eat potatoes, there's only one reasonable way to interpret the sentence as written. There's no reason to care about the ambiguity, and the original sentence is fine. Instead though, if the sentence read

Karl eats more seaweed than fish.

then there might be some reason to care about the ambiguity, because it's possible fish do eat seaweed (I don't know what fish eat ), so then I'd think it best not to omit the comparison words -- I'd prefer the sentence say "Karl eats more seaweed than he eats fish" or something like that, if that's the intended meaning.

In general, any time in a GMAT SC question I noticed a comparison that omitted comparison words, I'd always ask whether the comparison was open to two different interpretations, just because if that issue is potentially present in an actual SC question, it's very likely relevant. And if I wasn't sure, I'd err on the side of clarity over concision: if a comparison might be ambiguous (but you aren't sure one way or the other), and one answer choice resolves that ambiguity, I'd pick that over the shorter answer that omits the clarifying words.

While market-driven competition encourages pharmaceutical companies to actively seek innovative new drugs, market analysts note that marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as research.

We have split of as much as....C & D are out
Comparison between marketing accounts and research accounts A is out

A) marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as research
B) marketing accounts for twice as much of the industry budget as does research
C) the industry budget is accounted for twice as much by marketing than research
D) the industry budget is accounted for twice as much by marketing than by research
E) marketing new drugs is twice as expensive compared to research. Meaning error

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