Hey mundasingh:
To your initial question about "for"...again, this is just my way of thinking of it so I hope you take the general lesson (think about meaning) more so than this specific "meaning-of-for" lesson.
But even with the "mowed the lawn" example, there's a clear beneficiary (the people who don't have to mow their lawn). With the likelihood of violence...there's no "beneficiary". With likelihood, you could probably say:
-Son, before you shoot let me lower the basketball rim to increase the likelihood for you.
Because the kid is the beneficiary. Again, I don't even know 100% on this but if someone were to write that I wouldn't be bothered by it. And the main point I'm trying to make is that there is a method for making decisions that you aren't completely sure about:
1) See if there is another decision point that's more "GMAT" (verb tense, pronoun, etc.)
2) If not, try the expression in your own sentence to get a feel for its meaning. Is there a similar situation in which you would/wouldn't use it? Just like on the math section, the GMAT is really good at giving you something that, in your own situation, you'd get right every time, but in the unique-looking situation that the test presents it's difficult. So, often, it's really helpful to run a parallel problem or sentence on your own terms to help see the concept more clearly.
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Now, for that Houdini question... You can use the same kind of logic or process here, too. With "claim" there are some common uses:
"I claim this land in the name of the king" (you're using "claim" to show ownership of a unique resource...a noun - "land")
"He claims to have met Muhammad Ali at Burger King" (here it's a unique ability or experience, and that "to have" helps with the infinitive form of the verb to keep things organized)
"He claims that he once ate 50 McNuggets in one sitting" (again, here, the "that" is used for spacing between two verbs: "claims" and "ate", kind of like "claims" and "to have met" before.
Well, in the Houdini example you're closer to the second and third examples here. He's not staking claim to an object...he's claiming an experience or ability, so the "idiom" is correct in D.
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Now, we know that the GMAT has backed off of idiomatic references so the point on these two examples may be moot...but may not. The bigger lesson is that it's often helpful to put these phrases in your own context to see what you'd use if given the choice.
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
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