In contrast to

IMO parallel structure is apt.

Good question, confuse - and I've seen this ideology come up a lot on here so I'm glad you brought it up.

Parallel structure doesn't need to be word-for-word the same! As long as it's completely logical you should look for other major decision points.

Colloquially, I don't know that I'd ever say "the wife of Ram", but that same structure in a different context should prove the point:

The alumni association of the University of Michigan has twice as many members as the University of Minnesota's alumni group.

Even though one uses the apostrophe-s ('s) possessive and the other uses ______ of ______ to show possession, those two items are still a proper comparison. They don't need to be word-for-word the same exact form in order to be logically parallel.

Similarly, I've seen on this forum recently some debate over verb tense in parallel form. But this sentence:

In order to break the world record at next summer's Olympics, Brian will need to run even faster than Usain Bolt ran at the 2009 World Championships.

People didn't like the idea of "will need to run" vs. "ran" as parallel components, but they're as parallel as we can get in a situation in which one event has already happened (2009) and one has yet to happen (next summer). We can't logically compare these two races in the same exact verb tense because they happen at completely different points in time from our vantage point. To combine verb tenses would be woefully illogical.


Make sure that your standard here is "logically parallel" and not "verbatim word-for-word, tense-for-tense parallel". If you get down to two using your other tools and you're still stuck, then maybe err on the side of "as parallel as possible", but I've seen many a GMAT student miss questions looking for their perfect ideal of parallelism and in doing so they miss some other egregious errors.