With total sales of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

Question

With total sales  of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer  new subscribers than last year, the New England Theater Company is in danger of losing its building.

(A) of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

(B) lower than three hundred thousand dollars and less

(C) lesser than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

(D) fewer than three hundred thousand dollars and less

(E) of fewer than three hundred thousand dollars and of fewer

patedhav · Accepted Answer

IMO A).
Have you gone through Manhattan SC (Odds and Ends) book? - It is clearly mentioned in this book about this trap.

Be careful with unit nouns.......such as dollars or gallons....By their nature they are countable (example: one dollar, two dollar etc) and so they work with most of the countable modifiers. However, unit nous represents the uncountable quantities: money, volume (one money, two money etc).

As a result we use "less" with unit nouns when we really want to indicate something about underlying quantity.

We have less than twenty dollars.........ex.

If we write we have fewer than twenty dollars that means (20 piece of papers)....so whenever underlying quantity is uncountable then use less than (especially in case of money and volume).

egmat · Answer

Hi All,

The usage of “lesser” is incorrect in Choice C because “less” is already in comparative degree.

Little (positive), Less (comparative), Least (superlative)

Hence, we cannot use “lesser” to show the comparative degree. As one of the posters mentioned, we can use it as adjective followed by a noun.

For e.g.: I have lesser ice cream than you have.

Hope this helps.
Thanks
Shraddha

asthanap · Answer

Should be A

Both 'Less than' and 'fewer' is rightly used.

Less than is used to show decrease in value and lower than in physical level. For example water level is lower than

gmatjon · Answer

For dollar sales u need to use less,
It is an idiomatic expression.

SaraiYaseenGMAT · Answer

Disagree with the explanation given: This is not a matter of idiomatic usage. When a collection of units acts as a unified whole, it is considered one, singular unit. Consider for example the following two sentences: Four hours is a long time. v.s. The four hours were excruciating. (Though it is hoped that they will not be if you practice enough :wink:

) The first "four hours" act one unit, and the second "four hours" are being considered individually. In most of the SC problems, # + Unit (time, currency, weight, distance, etc.) = SINGULAR (and therefore non-count). If this helped, kindly give Kudos! For more on this subject, check out the the second lesson in SC-- Subject-Verb Agreement -- at gmaxonline

seekmba · Answer

Why is option (C) wrong inspite of the parallelism?

With total sales  of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer  new subscribers than last year, the New England Theatre Company is in danger of losing its building.

A. of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

C. lesser than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

SaraiYaseenGMAT · Answer

Hi seekmba,

As nightwing79 posted above, the difference between less and lesser is not grammatical-- both words are the comparative. However, they have different meanings. "Lesser" means inferior, while "less" relates to quantity. Thus, meaning, not parallelism is the issue in C.

Best,
Sarai

ZMAT · Answer

By looking at AND i thought this issue is also testing parallelism. Are less and fewer parallel?

bleemgame · Answer

It's not a parallelism it's testing for here but a less than vs. fewer choice.... some posts here have suggested C - but if you insert option C into the sentence you can see this is wrong... "With total sales lesser than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer"... (ouch!). 'Lesser' is rarely used but occasionally seen in a comparitive sense as in 'the least of' (e.g. "it is the lesser of two evils"), or occasionally appearing in names of animals "the lesser spotted woodpecker".) A common GMAT trap is to use money in SC - you need to be careful when considering whether the object proposed is countable or not. 'Money' is'nt usually used as a countable noun - it's not correct to say "one money", "two moneys (or monies)" etc - similarly we would use "less money," not "fewer money." That said, we would use 'fewer' when counting (one dollar, two dollars) so a correct comparative term is "fewer dollars". eg: "I have less money than you", "I have fewer dollars than you" Countable nouns can also be used to represent quantitave measurements (as we find in this question) – consider sums of money, periods of time and distance. Here, we'd see that whilst minutes / dollars / miles etc are countable, the correct form would be "less than ten minutes left", "less than a hundred dollars" and "less than three miles" Remember, here we are referring to quantities, not countable units. Answer 'A' correctly assigns the property "of less than three hundred thousand dollars" to "total sales", and recognises new subscribers as countable, using "fewer".

ChrisLele · Answer

$300k is a number. Therefore, we want 'less than.' We can count 'subscribers', so we want to use 'fewer.' Only answer (A) matches this. Hopefully that makes sense, but if you have any more questions regarding 'fewer' vs. 'less than', I'll happily elaborate

.

deekshant111 · Answer

Explanation: 
 
Appropriate quantity words must be used.  Less – is used for uncountable nouns and ‘few’ is used for countable nouns.  This concept is correctly followed in the original sentence, as shown below.

A-CORRECT.

B-…less – used for uncountable nouns; subscribers – countable.

C-The sales are not lesser than …dollars; but the sales figure is less that a certain number of dollars.

D-Same as B.

E-...the three hundred thousand dollars – is coming in as a total sum here; to use the word ‘less’ is correct as it shows a quantum. Sales – is a total figure or value.

ctst · Answer

The answer is “A”.

“Fewer” is used to refer to number among things that are counted, as in "fewer choices" and "fewer problems.” “Less” is used to refer to quantity or amount among things that are measured, as in "less time" and "less effort."

Posted from my mobile device

Jezza · Answer

I see a lot of people are struggling with "less" vs "lesser". Glad I play video games in which I fight a great varierty of monsters, either weak or strong.

When I face "lesser doomguard", this means that the doomguard (a type of monster) is of a weaker, inferior sub-species of doomguard. It does not mean that I am fighting with half of a monster or fewer monsters. Lesser is only a subjective of quality, having nothing to do with quantity.

However, the opposite word "greater" is where it gets tricky, because greater can describe both quality and quantity. Yes I fight against single "greater doomguard", "greater skeleton", and "greater flaming mage", and sometimes confront a greater number of monsters.

See the trick here? I am sure GMAT will test this again.

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With total sales of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

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