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Ellipsis

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by shivani.magan » Thu Feb 02, 2012 3:45 am
Hello

I have a Q from OG12 that I need some help with

Dirt roads may evoke the bucolic simplicity of another century, but financially strained townships point out that dirt roads cost twice as much as maintaining paved roads.

(A) dirt roads cost twice as much as maintaining paved roads
(B) dirt roads cost twice as much to maintain as paved roads do
(C) maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as paved roads do
(D) maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as it does for paved roads
(E) to maintain dirt roads costs twice as much as for paved roads


I can't understand the difference between B and C . I picked C and can't understand why is it the wrong answer .

The OA is B.
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by sam2304 » Thu Feb 02, 2012 5:24 am
C is wrong as do is not parallel to maintaining. Maintenance of dirt roads is compared to paved roads whereas it should be maintenance of X and maintenance of Y.

dirt roads cost twice as much to maintain as paved roads do (cost to maintain) - this is fine.

When faced with ellipsis construction try to replace with actual words. You will find it easy to find the answer. C here looks awkward with the ellipsis construction as the comparison is not proper.

Hence B.
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by EducationAisle » Thu Feb 02, 2012 8:54 am
The only way of interpreting C is: "maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as paved roads do (cost)". But this is clearly not what the original sentence intends to convey.

Note that we cannot interpret it has "maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as paved roads do (cost to maintain)", because there is no 'to maintain' structure in the first half of the sentence.
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by karthikgmat » Thu Feb 02, 2012 8:57 am
Is D wrong in grammatical way? Does it differ in meaning with B?
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by EducationAisle » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:07 am
Pronoun "it" would refer to "maintaining dirt roads". So, D would read:

..maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as it (maintaining dirt roads) does (costs) for paved roads.

But this doesn't make sense: maintaining dirt roads costs for paved roads.
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by shivani.magan » Thu Feb 02, 2012 11:11 am
sam2304 wrote:C is wrong as do is not parallel to maintaining. Maintenance of dirt roads is compared to paved roads whereas it should be maintenance of X and maintenance of Y.

dirt roads cost twice as much to maintain as paved roads do (cost to maintain) - this is fine.

When faced with ellipsis construction try to replace with actual words. You will find it easy to find the answer. C here looks awkward with the ellipsis construction as the comparison is not proper.

Hence B.

Sam ,
I got why B is correct but have a doubt in C.

Cant i interpret C ( maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as paved roads do ) as

maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as maintaining paved roads do . What i am doing here?
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by MakeUrTimeCount » Thu Feb 02, 2012 12:45 pm
Sam ,
I got why B is correct but have a doubt in C.

Cant i interpret C ( maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as paved roads do ) as

maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as maintaining paved roads do . What i am doing here?
Here you should interpret C as:
maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as paved roads do (cost).

As Sam rightly said, the parallelism has been broken. So C is incorrect.

Hope it helps :)
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by e-GMAT » Thu Feb 02, 2012 2:42 pm
shivani.magan wrote:Sam ,
I got why B is correct but have a doubt in C.

Cant i interpret C ( maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as paved roads do ) as

maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as maintaining paved roads do . What i am doing here?
Hi Shivani,
Per your interpretation, the choice reads: maintaining dirt roads costs twice as much as maintaining paved roads do.

So in a way, you are saying: Maintaining dirt roads costs (singular verb) 2x. However, maintaining paved roads cost (plural verb) only x, which is not correct because "do" is a plural verb. We need a singular verb "does" to agree in number with "(maintaining) pave roads". We clearly have SV number agreement error here.
"do" is plural verb that goes with plural subject "pave roads" that renders the comparison illogical here. Choice C compares the maintenance cost of dirt roads with the cost of pave roads.

In Choice B, "dirt roads cost" (plural SV pair) is grammatically as well as logically parallel to "pave roads do" (plural SV pair).

Hope this helps.
Shraddha

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