Sentence Correction

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

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

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

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