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A recording system

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by ektamatta » Mon Jul 28, 2008 12:51 pm
8.A recording system was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office that even Theodore C. Sorensen, the White House counsel, did not know it existed.
(A) A recording system was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office that
(B) So secret was a recording system installation and operation in the Kennedy Oval Office
(C) It was so secret that a recording system was installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office
(D) A recording system that was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office
(E) Installed and operated so secretly in the Kennedy Oval Office was a recording system that
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by sibbineni » Mon Jul 28, 2008 2:56 pm
IMO A
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by swati.sug » Mon Jul 28, 2008 3:10 pm
A should be the answer..
What was your choice
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a

by ektamatta » Mon Jul 28, 2008 7:56 pm
yes OA is A. please explain
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by reachac » Mon Jul 28, 2008 8:02 pm
IMO A
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by swati.sug » Mon Jul 28, 2008 9:13 pm
So ...secretly installed ........that is the correct idiom
So B C D are out
A and E remain...E is passive ...so A remain
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by NSNguyen » Thu Jul 31, 2008 12:34 am
A is right choice
B wordy
C it - redundancy
D lack That
E wordy
Please share your idea and your reasoning :D
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by jsl » Sun Oct 05, 2008 6:18 am
On this question, I guessed between E and A. The reason I didn't choose A was because I believed that the pronoun "it" at the end of the sentence did not have a clear referent.

In this sentence, couldn't "it" refer to the "Oval Office"? I thought that a pronoun always refers to the closest noun.

If someone could clarify the rules surrounding this, I would be very thankful - I'm finding that I'm starting to hyper-correct my answer choices and thus get them wrong! So glad I've got my test in 2 weeks!
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by haveto » Sat Jun 19, 2010 4:44 pm
is E grammatically correct?

Lets assume the sentence is
"Installed and operated so secretly in the Kennedy Oval Office was a recording system that was used by XYZ."

Is this sentence correct? I guess No!
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by hilbert » Fri Sep 09, 2011 4:20 pm
Can we please underline the dang-on question!!! God Dang it dude. I can't stand when people do this.

8.A recording system was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office that even Theodore C. Sorensen, the White House counsel, did not know it existed.
(A) A recording system was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office that

"A recording system was installed ..in the oval office"
"A recording system was operated .. in the oval office"

We have parallelism.

A recording system was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office that Blah Blah did not know about it

Parallelism in the "So X, That Y". The idiom is being correctly used.

"So Secretly". How was the system installed? Ah! Secretly. It is an adverb, because its modifying a verb. Remember if it modifies anything but a noun, its an adverb.


(B) So secret was a recording system installation and operation in the Kennedy Oval Office
Does not use the idiom correctly, we are missing "That" in the "So X, That Y". If you don't know the idiom, now you do.

But also notice the sentence does not make any sense. "So secret was a recording system" ??? What??
As soon as you read this cross it out. Don't even waste your time reading the entire sentence.


(C) It was so secret that a recording system was installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office

OMG really?? "It was so secret that a recording system was installed" ???? Come on please, don't tell me some of you fell for this. Besides the fact the sentence is passive, even if we rearranged the sentence to make it active it would still be wrong. "It [[a recording system]] was so secret that a recording system ". A recording system was "so secret"?? Notice how we repeated the same noun twice in literally a few words apart. X was so secret that X blah blah blah. Couldn't we have just said "X was Blah Blah, That Blah Blah"? Did we have to repeat the same noun twice?? Come on folks. Please.

Not to mention, the sentence is missing "that" in the "So X, That Y"

(D) A recording system that was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office

" A recording system that..". WRONG!! OMG we have "so secretly" being used incorrectly again.
Folks it should be "The recording system was so secretive, that it went undetected"

(E) Installed and operated so secretly in the Kennedy Oval Office was a recording system that

Passive voice. "installed .. was a recording a system". "so secretly" is incorrectly used once more.
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by cans » Sat Sep 10, 2011 4:27 am
IMO A
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by gmatnerd » Tue Feb 07, 2012 5:38 am
For the option D is it ok(i mean will it be correct) if we add that after the oval office ?
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by e-GMAT » Tue Feb 07, 2012 10:06 am
gmatnerd wrote:For the option D is it ok(i mean will it be correct) if we add that after the oval office ?
Hi,

The sentence will remain incorrect even if we add that before "even".

Let's take this example:

The plant that grew in my backyard last summer has started bearing flowers.

In this sentence, "that grew in my backyard last summer" is a dependent clause with "that" as a subject and "grew" as the verb for that subject. "that" stands for "the plant".

After removing this DC, we are left with the independent clause that reads "The plant has started bearing flowers." Here, "the plant" is the subject and the verb for that subject is "has started bearing". So, whether an independent clause or a dependent, a clause must have a subject and a verb.

Now let's see option D of the sentence in question with "that": A recording system that was so secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office THAT even Theodore C. Sorensen, the White House counsel, did not know it existed.

This sentence is still incorrect because there is no verb for the subject "A recording system" that makes this sentence fragment. Missing verb results in an incomplete idea. We expect to read something else, a complete idea, about the subject that never appears.

It is like saying: The plant that grew in my backyard last year that even my mother nurtured it. If we find DV pairs in this sentence we will find:

1. The plant - ???
2. That - grew
3. My mother - nurtured

Hope this helps.
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by gmatnerd » Wed Feb 08, 2012 7:04 am
Thanks for the insight on DCs :).i didnt know the mechanics before.After analysing the sentence with these rules,i felt "know" is working as the verb for the clause(ignoring the noun modifier).Please help me if i am missing something.
The reason i am dwelling too much in to the wrong answer is because, there is no point in solving lot of questions without knowing why a wrong answer is wrong and how can it be corrected.

Thanks in advance
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by e-GMAT » Fri Feb 10, 2012 8:38 am
gmatnerd wrote:Thanks for the insight on DCs :).i didnt know the mechanics before.After analysing the sentence with these rules,i felt "know" is working as the verb for the clause(ignoring the noun modifier).Please help me if i am missing something.
The reason i am dwelling too much in to the wrong answer is because, there is no point in solving lot of questions without knowing why a wrong answer is wrong and how can it be corrected.

Thanks in advance
Hi,
You are absolutely correct. We must have valid reasons to eliminate a choice.

Coming to your query, a verb must have a subject and vice-versa. Presence of the subject-verb pair is mandatory to form a clause, either IC or DC.

"did not know" in the original sentence is the verb. So what's the subject for this verb? Who "did not know"? The answer is "Theodore C. Sorensen". He did not know about this recording system that was secretly installed and operated in the Kennedy Oval Office. So the subject-verb pair in the IC is "Sorensen" - "did not know".

In the DC, the verb is "was installed and operated"? What "was installed and operated"? The answer is "A recording system". Hence the SV pair in the DC is "A recording player" - "was installed and operated".

So remember that a verb MUST pair with subject to form a clause. A verb does not function as a verb for a clause.

Hope this helps.
Shraddha
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