Sentence Correction

OA is E - posted here https://www.urch.com/forums/gmat-sentenc ... tions.html

hengirl03 wrote:the idiom that you should be worrying about is "more X than Y".

Maybe this will help. Read only the parts of the sentence that I have bolded.


According to a 1996 survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, more than three times as many independent institutions of higher education charge tuition and fees of under $8,000 a year than those that charge over $16,000.

Will THAN always follow MORE ???

mmslf75 wrote:

hengirl03 wrote:the idiom that you should be worrying about is "more X than Y".

Maybe this will help. Read only the parts of the sentence that I have bolded.


According to a 1996 survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, more than three times as many independent institutions of higher education charge tuition and fees of under $8,000 a year than those that charge over $16,000.

Will THAN always follow MORE ???

Yes. Well, at least right now, I can't think of a sentence where "than" wouldn't come after "more". Now, that doesn't mean that "than" has to come immediately after "more". For example, you can have an intervening adjective between "more" and "than": "the new design is more modern than the old one".

Notice you can't add the suffix "er" to the adjective "modern" (ie, you can't have "moderner"). Now, if the comparison is using an adjective where you can add the suffix "er" to the end of the adjective, then the sentence can't at the same time use "more".

So, grammatically, you can have:

1) "the new building is more tall than the old one"

or you can have:

2) "the new building is taller than the old one"

but you CAN'T have:

3) "the new building is more taller than the old one".

That said, if on the GMAT you had to choose between 1) and 2), you should go with 2) because it is stylistically superior (b/c it uses a fewer number of words, and so is more concise).