Sentence Correction

In 1998, there were 3.2 million public school students who were not proficient in English in the USA, almost twice as many as 1990.

(A) almost twice as many as
(B) almost twice as many as in
(C) almost twice as many as there were in
(D) nearly twice as many as in
(E) about twice as many as there were in

[spoiler]OA Later
A can be easily eliminated.
Please Explain B/C/D/E[/spoiler]

IMO C

(A) almost twice as many as

twice as many what ?

(B) almost twice as many as in

Not clear similar problem as A

(C) almost twice as many as there were in

Correct - Almost is used with people

(D) nearly twice as many as in

nearly is not used with people

(E) about twice as many as there were in

about not used with people

What is OA ?

ONE MORE FOR C

OA is C.

thanks everybody.

What is the source of this question?

Why B is wrong? Why 'there were' needs to be present in underlined portion? If you remove 'there were' from non-underlined part and insert B, then also sentence is clear.

What is wrong with B?

paes wrote:In 1998, there were 3.2 million public school students who were not proficient in English in the USA, almost twice as many as 1990.

(A) almost twice as many as
(B) almost twice as many as in
(C) almost twice as many as there were in
(D) nearly twice as many as in
(E) about twice as many as there were in

[spoiler]OA Later
A can be easily eliminated.
Please Explain B/C/D/E[/spoiler]

I have the same query as Sudhanshu

Yes Can somebody please explain why B is wrong?
i think

"In 1998, there were 3.2 million public school students who were not proficient in English in the USA, almost twice as many as in 1990. "

clearly pass the information.

Thanks

I am happy to see your queries for B.
Even I selected B, but OA was C, so I put this question here.

Source is BTG itself :
https://www.beatthegmat.com/english-prof ... 55231.html

An expert has replied to this problem so I took the OA as C.
I am also more convinced with B.

Some other expert please help here.

Expert help needed !!

Waiting for some expert advice.

I sent PM to Andrea. Lets wait for a reply from her.

Responding to a PM from reply2spg. I really don't have anything new to add here; my response in the other thread still stands (minus the typo):

"I believe that the answer here would be C, because "as there were in" is necessary to establish that the comparison is between the numbers of students who weren't proficient in 1998 and 1990. If the sentence just said "as in 1990," it could be read as comparing "in English" to "in 1990," which doesn't make sense."

Regardless of whether the intended meaning can logically be discerned, it's generally better on sentence corrections to maintain a structure that eliminates any possible ambiguity. Parallelism requires "as there were in," rather than simply "as in," and "almost" is preferable to "about" when the intended meaning is "nearly," making C a better choice than E.

I forgot exactly where I read this, so I can't cite the source like I normally do.

"as many as" is a parallel marker, and whatever noun that comes before it should be made comparable to whatever comes after it, similar to "like".

"Like GRE, GMAT is a graduate school entrance exam."

In B, "almost twice as many as in" is missing the 2nd comparable noun phrase, and went straight into a preposition.