Kelly wrote:In commercial garment construction, one advantage of serging over single needle sewing is that the seam allowance is overcast as the seam is sewn instead of with a separate process requiring deeper seam allowances.
A) instead of with
B) rather than in
C) in contrast with
D) as opposed to
E) instead of
Hello, all. I'm happy to help.
BTW, here's a free idiom ebook that you may find helpful:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-book-reviews-2013/
When we want to compare simple nouns, we have a variety of options:
A instead of B
A as opposed to B
A in contrast with B
Notice, all of those end with a preposition, so the object could only possibly be a noun.
When we want to compare actions, entire clauses, or even just adverbs, prepositional phrases, etc. etc. --- anything other than a noun ---- then we have to use "
rather than". Thus,
(B) has to be the answer.
kisna_428 asked about the parallelism. Here's the parallelism of the correct answer.
In commercial garment construction, one advantage of serging over single needle sewing is
//
that the seam allowance is overcast as the seam is sewn
rather than
//[that the seam allowance is sewn]
in a separate process requiring deeper seam allowances.
That's the parallelism, with the omitted words included in brackets. Two "that"-clauses are in parallel, but most of the common words have been omitted from the second branch of the parallelism. This is both what is most efficient about parallelism and hardest to understand about it ---- we can drop repeated words in the second branch.
Does all this make sense?
Mike
