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Comparison question

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Comparison question

by prachi18oct » Sun Oct 05, 2014 12:07 am
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Hello experts,

In the given sentence, should the correct comparison not be "than those" rather than only "than".
Are we are saying that more babies were born to women who were above 30 years of age than babies who were born to women under 30 years of age. so the comparison is between number of babies born or between the women,who are giving birth, above 30 and under 30?

if number of babies are compared => more babies were born to women over the age of thirty than [born to those] under it. is it implicit ?

I believe since "more" is closer to babies, so the comparison should be between babies..Please explain.
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by [email protected] » Sun Oct 05, 2014 11:49 am
Hi prachi18oct,

The big clue in this SC is the last 2 words in the sentence: "....under it." Since we can't change those words, we have to make sure that the rest of the sentence makes sense AND ends with those two words.

We're clearly dealing with a comparison; the words "more babies.....than...." provides the comparison. Comparisons almost always involve Parallelism rules, so we need to consider that....

".....under it." is supposed to be parallel to what?
".....over it....."

Here, the phrase "...over the age of thirty..." is later followed by the parallel phrase "...under it...." ("it" refers to "the age of thirty"). These elements ARE parallel, so we don't really need to include any additional words.

The sentence COULD have been written in the following way: "more babies were born to women over the age of thirty than to women under the age of thirty." That option is NOT in the answer choices though - also notice that it includes redundant language that the GMAT tends to remove from a correct answer.

The correct answer just needs to complete the Comparison phrase. The word "than' is all that's needed.

Final Answer: A

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by EducationAisle » Mon Oct 13, 2014 12:30 am
If you notice, the sentence is:

..more babies were born to women (who were) over the age of thirty than under it (the age of thirty).

The comparison operator is than. The clause to the immediate left hand side of this comparison operator is:

women were over the age of thirty

Notice that babies is not even present in this clause on the immediate left hand side of the comparison operator. Hence, babies is not a part of comparison at all, and so, born on the right hand side of the comparison operator (which obviously is intended to refer to babies) is incorrect.

So, the only comparison that can be made, is for women:

a) women (who were) were over the age of thirty
b) women (who were) under it (the age of thirty)

p.s. Our book EducationAisle Sentence Correction Nirvana discusses comparison framework, its application and examples in significant detail. If you can PM you email-id, I can send you the corresponding section.
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GMAT Faculty @ EducationAisle
www.EducationAisle.com

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b) Flipkart: Sentence Correction Nirvana

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