Sentence Correction

in general, yes, it's best to assume that the OG questions are gold.
the OG answer explanations are probably a bit closer to pyrite, but that's another discussion for another day.

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the logical antecedent of "it" is "music".

"collections" doesn't make sense as an antecedent, anyway. the meaning of the choices with "them" (= collections) isn't reasonable: those sentences imply that the people are actually transferring/copying/altering their entire collections of music, all at once.
this idea is a bit farfetched to begin with -- but let's not forget that the collections are described as "vast", making this interpretation even less feasible.

on the other hand, "it" = music makes perfect sense. what are they transferring, copying, and altering? well, music, of course.

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The use of "it" to refer to "music" implies that the audiophiles are transferring ALL music, not the specific collections that they own.

hmm? whoa, no.

i bought 100 cans of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi so that I can drink it all month long.
--> in this (perfectly correct) sentence, i am clearly not implying that i want to drink all the diet pepsi in the world (delicious as that may sound!).

i have a rather large collection of leather jackets; i wear them all the time, even in the summer.
--> again, i am not implying that i wear all the leather jackets in the world.

in any case, the parallel structure makes this problem pretty much a slam dunk. each of (a), (c), (d), and (e) contains at least one blatant breach of parallelism. (in the last three choices, the forms of transfer/copy/alter are nonparallel. in (a) and (d), "little effort" doesn't work with "not damaging...".)

there's no question that this one is (b). everything that's tested here is bedrock.

Bill@VeritasPrep wrote:I definitely misspoke on the "ALL music" comment, and this is a good example of how one can find something they like about a sentence and overlook other errors to make it fit.

Maybe that's just me though :D

i think what's more likely is that you got knee-deep in "theory" and momentarily forgot to consider the way in which the real, live language actually works (i.e., examples).

remember, we're humans, not computers. we learn (and master) language by imitation, NOT by "rules". (try to find me one single person who learned his/her native language as a kid by thinking about stuff like "participles" and "voices". go!)
as a result, if you just apply a bunch of "rules" to miscellaneous issues like this one -- without stopping to consider analogous examples -- it's easy to arrive at wrong conclusions.

this is something that you should do every single time you ever conclude ANYTHING in sentence correction, whether you are a student, an instructor, or a random instructor's wife who likes to read the threads for fun**. always come up with examples to test out your conclusions before broadcasting them.

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**any similarity to actual living persons is purely coincidental.

ice_rush wrote:I thought GMAC created original questions?? Didn't even cross my mind for a second that they'd be stealing questions from science magazines.

This question was directly copied or plagiarized if you will from an article in Discover Magazine:

GMAC often adapts sentences from reputable sources.

if they didn't adapt sentences from somewhere, then all of their sentences would be written in the GMAC question writers' own style.
(it's extremely difficult to write authentically in a style that isn't your usual one. this is in fact the main reason why there's still an AWA section on the gmat: if a school suspects that your admissions essays were written by someone else, they can just cross-check the writing style against your AWA.)

as for "stealing" and "plagiarizing" -- such emotionally laden words! -- well, hardly.
both of those words imply illegal copying without permission. you can rest assured that a monolithic entity like GMAC has obtained the appropriate permission/licenses.

I guess people who've been reading such magazines would have an unfair advantage over those who have not... Any comments?

not at all, unless such people actually remembered every sentence that they ever read in those sources. and that's "remembered" not only in the sense of content, but also in the sense of exact wording.
that's clearly not going to happen.
and, even if we entertain for a moment the rather outlandish notion of a person whose memory actually is that good, well, let's just say getting an MBA would be the wrong career track for such a person. (human genome, anyone?)

ice_rush wrote:thanks for the clarification, Ron. didn't mean to accuse GMAT of stealing...

but you actually wrote the word "stealing"! (and "plagiarizing", too.)

one thing that's beautiful about written forums on the internet -- as opposed to real-life conversations -- is that you have that gorgeous thing called the delete/backspace key, which allows you to, well, take back certain things and pretend you never said them. (:

the flipside of this fact, of course, is the fact that the words you write matter a lot more, because, basically, there's no such thing as an accidental slip-up anymore. anything you post represents not just something you actually said, but something you said, didn't take back, and consciously decided to publish.

the reason i'm taking the time to write this is that, presumably, you have ambitions in the business world -- and, more and more with each passing year, "the business world" has a huge presence on the internet. we now live in a world where you can sell things in seconds to people 10,000 miles away... but it's also a world in which a single tweet, or a single sentence in a blog post, can destroy your career. so, basically, watch it.

I am sure they've legally covered themselves. I agree with the adaption part, but this specific question was pretty much a case of cut, copy, and paste.

yeah, not an uncommon situation, really.

you would be surprised how hard it is to create questions from scratch.
as test-prep people, we don't have to -- we have a bank of existing official problems for inspiration (although, of course, our work is of limited use if we write problems that are too similar to the official ones).
on the other hand, the gmac writers actually have to "make" sentences, from scratch, that don't resemble the sentences they wrote in previous problems. this is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard for people to do.

as an analogy, sing a song. now, try to make up another song whose melody has nothing in common with that one (or with any other song that might also be in your head). you'll find that this is almost impossible to do -- a fact that explains why GMAC needs to adapt problems from other sources to stay "fresh". (it also explains why the few people who have managed to create truly original music are all weirdos; people with normal brains are pretty much resigned to creating variations on themes that already exist.)