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OG#12, Que 52

by Hirshi » Wed May 16, 2012 8:47 pm
To Josephine Baker, Paris was her home long before it
was fashionable to be an expatriate, and she remained
in France during the Second World War as a performer
and an intelligence agent for the Resistance.

(A) To Josephine Baker, Paris was her home long
before it was fashionable to be an expatriate,
(B) For Josephine Baker, long before it was
fashionable to be an expatriate, Paris was
her home,
(C) Josephine Baker made Paris her home long
before to be an expatriate was fashionable,
(D) Long before it was fashionable to be an
expatriate, Josephine Baker made Paris
her home,
(E) Long before it was fashionable being an
expatriate, Paris was home to Josephine Baker


Can someone explain in simple words, how to solve this ?
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by avik.ch » Wed May 16, 2012 9:14 pm
Here is a link that you may find helpful :

https://www.beatthegmat.com/to-josephine ... 60-15.html

Please post if you got any specific doubt on this.

Hope this helps !!
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by Tommy Wallach » Sat Jan 26, 2013 6:06 pm
Though indeed this question has been explained elsewhere, we might as well have the solution on this thread, seeing as this thread exists!

To Josephine Baker, Paris was her home long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate, and she remained in France during the Second World War as a performer and an intelligence agent for the Resistance.

(A) To Josephine Baker, Paris was her home long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate,
(B) For Josephine Baker, long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate, Paris was her home,
(C) Josephine Baker made Paris her home long before to be an expatriate was fashionable,
(D) Long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate, Josephine Baker made Paris her home,
(E) Long before it was fashionable being an expatriate, Paris was home to Josephine Baker

(A) doesn't make sense. It's idiomatically incorrect to say "to Josephine Baker." What is "to" her? Nothing is going to her, nor is it "According to her". Logically, there's no meaning using "to" that makes sense.

(B) "For Josephine Baker" could be a correct idiom, but isn't here. What needs to come after that phrase is something subjective. For example "For Steve Jobs, no amount of work was ever enough." There's an understanding that he's being compared to other people. But you can't say "For Tommy, December 19th is his birthday." That's just a fact. Josephine Baker DID live in Paris. That's not a characteristic that can be described that way.

(C) "Long before to be an expatriate was fashionable" is incorrect because there's no grammatically viable subject for the verb "was." The subject of a sentence must be a noun, and "to be an expatriate" is a verb phrase (infinitive), not a noun.

(E) has the most simple error. "Long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate" needs to modify whatever comes after it. That should be Josephine Baker, not Paris.

Hope that helps!

-t
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by tanviet » Wed Feb 13, 2013 3:08 am
(E) has the most simple error. "Long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate" needs to modify whatever comes after it. That should be Josephine Baker, not Paris.

I do not understand the above , pls explain more fully, thank you
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by Tommy Wallach » Wed Feb 13, 2013 9:37 am
Hey Duong,

If this error is not comprehensible to you, you definitely need to spend more time with a basic GMAT SC book. Misplaced modifiers are one of the more common mistakes you'll see on the test.

Misplaced modifiers: A noun modifier should touch the noun it modifies.

In this case, the person who was an expatriate is Josephine Baker, not Paris. So the opening modifier needs to touch Josephine Baker.

Hope that's clearer!

-t
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by tanviet » Wed Feb 13, 2013 5:32 pm
modifier should be close the the noun modified. modifier is difined grammatically. in E, expatriate is not modifier of Baker.

pls give more examples of the case in E so that I can see this type of modifier

thank you expert
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by iongmat » Wed Feb 13, 2013 8:55 pm
Tommy Wallach wrote: Misplaced modifiers: A noun modifier should touch the noun it modifies.

In this case, the person who was an expatriate is Josephine Baker, not Paris. So the opening modifier needs to touch Josephine Baker.

-t
Hello Tommy, I don't believe there is any modifier error in E. How about the following sentence:

Before it was fashionable to be a movie star, it was fashionable to be a model.

Is the above sentence incorrect, because "it" is close to "movie star".

Kindly advice.
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by avik.ch » Wed Feb 13, 2013 9:37 pm
iongmat wrote: Hello Tommy, I don't believe there is any modifier error in E. How about the following sentence:

Before it was fashionable to be a movie star, it was fashionable to be a model.

Is the above sentence incorrect, because "it" is close to "movie star".

Kindly advice.
"it was fashionable to be a movie star" --- this is an extraposed structure, where we are shifting the long subject clause/phrase to the end of the sentence with a expletives "it", just for the sake of beautification. here, "it" do not refer to anything. Expletives are words with only grammatical function in the sentence.

the book is on the table ---> there is a book on the table.

that the gmat is tough cannot be denied ----> it cannot be denied that the GMAT is tough.

to be a model was fashionable -----------> it was fashionable to be model.

in all of the above cases, "there" and "it" are expletives.

"before...." is an adverb of time and defines the time for the main verb "was". At the same time, it refers the logical subject that the verb in turn describe - here the logical subject is "to be a model". But this sentence is not similar to the one Tommy Sir was discussing above.

In the above question -- "long before..." is an adverb of time and cannot have "Paris" as a logical subject.

Hope this helps !!
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by iongmat » Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:30 pm
avik.ch wrote: In the above question -- "long before..." is an adverb of time and cannot have "Paris" as a logical subject.
Hello avik.ch, why should we worry about what "noun" is an adverb modifying? Adverbs are supposed to modify Verbs, Adjectives and other adverbs (not Nouns).
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by avik.ch » Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:53 pm
avik.ch wrote:
Hello avik.ch, why should we worry about what "noun" is an adverb modifying? Adverbs are supposed to modify Verbs, Adjectives and other adverbs (not Nouns).
an adverb modifies an action (verbs, participles.....) and the noun in turn performs the action. So an adverb modifies the action, while the action must be performed by "logical/sensible" noun. So we must take care in choosing the proper noun for it to perform the action. So in my post above, I was referring to the word "logical" and not "modification".


Hope this helps !!
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by iongmat » Thu Feb 14, 2013 12:36 am
avik.ch wrote:So in my post above, I was referring to the word "logical" and not "modification".
Hello avik.ch, if you look at Tommy's mail, it says:

"Long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate" needs to modify whatever comes after it.

What I am having difficulty understanding is as to why "Long before it was fashionable being an expatriate" should be followed with "who" was expatriate.

If the sentence was: Long before Jeremy was an expatriate, Tommy was an expatriate.

This would have made sense, because it would then be...Long before Jeremy was an expatriate..who was an expatriate?...Tommy.
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by GMATGuruNY » Thu Feb 14, 2013 5:22 am
iongmat wrote:
"Long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate" needs to modify whatever comes after it.

What I am having difficulty understanding is as to why "Long before it was fashionable being an expatriate" should be followed with "who" was expatriate.
Answer choice D:
Long before IT was fashionable being an expatriate, PARIS was home to Josephine Baker.
Here, it appears before its referent.
The intended referent is being an expatriate.
But the eye also sees Paris, with the result that a reader might construe that it is standing in for PARIS.
The result would be the following misinterpretation: that PARIS was fashionable and that PARIS was being an expatriate.
Clearly not the intended meaning.

The OA avoids this issue by replacing the gerund (being) with the infinitive (to be) and by making JOSEPHINE BAKER the subject of the sentence:
Long before it was fashionable to be an expatriate, JOSEPHINE BAKER made Paris her home.
Here, it has only one eligible referent: to be an expatriate.
Thus, there is no way for a reader to misinterpret the intended meaning.

We should also note the following:
In the OA, it serves as an EXPLETIVE: a placeholder pronoun serving to DELAY THE SUBJECT.

Two examples:
IT is easy TO LOVE CHOCOLATE.
Here, it is standing in for to love chocolate.
Meaning: TO LOVE CHOCOLATE is easy.
IT was not until last year THAT JOHN WROTE HIS FIRST BOOK.
Here, it is standing in for that John wrote his first book.
Meaning: THAT JOHN WROTE HIS FIRST BOOK was not until last year.

On the GMAT, the delayed subject is invariably either an INFINITIVE PHRASE or a THAT-clause, as in the examples above.
In E, the delayed subject is a GERUND phrase: IT was fashionable BEING AN EXPATRIATE.
AVOID this construction; to my knowledge, it has never appeared in an OA on the GMAT.
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by Tommy Wallach » Thu Feb 14, 2013 9:35 am
Hey All,

Looks like this has been put to bed, but I just wanted to back up the Guru. You can get rid of (E) purely on the "being," which the GMAT doesn't do. You can also say that the location of the modifier confuses the issue. This is adverbial, so it's modifying the verb "was" (not really the word Paris, though the "it" confuses things), but the meaning gets a bit scrambled because of it. Modifier issues tend to change meaning like that; that doesn't make them less grammatical.

-t
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by iongmat » Thu Feb 14, 2013 9:05 pm
Thanks Tommy, avik.ch and Mitch for your responses.
GMATGuruNY wrote: Being an expatriate is the act of a PERSON.
Sure Mitch, but "Being an expatriate" is also a "condition" (and so is "Paris was home to Josephine Baker").

I do understand that "it" is an expletive here, and I also understand that there are other reasons why E can be dis-regarded, but I am trying to understand the "modifier issue", as was originally pointed out by Tommy.

Also I looked at the OE for this and it looks like the OE also does not mention anything on the modifier front. While I understand that OEs are not "fool-proof", I would still think OE would point out if something as serious as "Dangling modifier" existed in this problem.
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by Tommy Wallach » Thu Feb 14, 2013 9:40 pm
At a second glance, I don't think it's a modifier issue. At least not to the extent that you could cross it out for that. HOWEVER, there is a definite improvement in clarity/meaning if we put Josephine Baker directly after the opening phrase, for the reasons that have now been stated ad nauseam. :)

T
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