SC - Adjective Adverb usage

karthikpandian19 wrote:I can hear fairly good, but my doctor tells me to wear hearing aids anyway

****Can you explain why the sentence as written above is wrong and explain the underlying concept****

alex.gellatly wrote:

karthikpandian19 wrote:I can hear fairly good, but my doctor tells me to wear hearing aids anyway

****Can you explain why the sentence as written above is wrong and explain the underlying concept****

You need to use the adv well, not the adj good. An adv is used to modify a verb (it can also modify all other parts of speech besides a noun.)

So... here we want to say "I can hear well". The adv is used to describe the verb hear.
We can also say "I can hear fairly well". Here the adv is used to modify the adv. fairly (as well as the verb hear).

You should use an adv. to answer the question "How does it {verb}? For Example in this sentence: How do you hear? I hear well. For another example we can say I drive my car carefully. (not careful). This answers the question "How do you drive?"

Be very careful of verbs like be, smell, look, ect. For example: we say I am good (because good describes the noun, not the verb). Another example: The flower smells wonderful (not wonderfully because here the verb smell is used like be. So we want to used the adj. to describe the noun flower. The flower doesn't actually do the action smell, but rather "is" wonderful.)

Does this help? Let me know if you have more grammar questions.

karthikpandian19 wrote:Alex,

The flowers smell well & The flowers smells good...........Here good / well explains the adverb right, but "good" seems to be correct ????
Can you explain?

alex.gellatly wrote:

karthikpandian19 wrote:Alex,

The flowers smell well & The flowers smells good...........Here good / well explains the adverb right, but "good" seems to be correct ????
Can you explain?

We should use: The flowers smell good. This is because the verb smell in the case is like "be". Smell is used as a non-action verb in this case. We are describing how the flowers are, not how the flowers do a verb.

Grammatically the sentence "the flowers smell well" means that the flowers are actually smelling, and they do a good job at smelling. This is obviously incorrect. However, note the sentence "my sister smells well" is grammatically fine although sounds a little strange. This means that my sister is good at smelling.

The Key to ADV and ADJ is to think about what you are trying to describe. Are you trying to describe the noun or how the noun does a verb. If its a noun use ADJ, if it s a verb use ADV

Does this help?

karthikpandian19 wrote:Alex,

This is the reply that i received from a Knewton Expert:

To say "The flowers smell well" would change the meaning of the sentence. It would mean that the flowers themselves are doing the smelling (and have excellent olfactory powers). To say that the flowers "smell good" means that the flowers give off a pleasant-smelling scent.

alex.gellatly wrote:

karthikpandian19 wrote:Alex,

This is the reply that i received from a Knewton Expert:

To say "The flowers smell well" would change the meaning of the sentence. It would mean that the flowers themselves are doing the smelling (and have excellent olfactory powers). To say that the flowers "smell good" means that the flowers give off a pleasant-smelling scent.

If you reread my post above this is exactly the explanation I told you. I said "Grammatically the sentence "the flowers smell well" means that the flowers are actually smelling, and they do a good job at smelling. This is obviously incorrect." Maybe you were confused with my wording that this is incorrect. Grammatically it is correct, but the meaning is nonsensical. How can a flower smell.

You are correct, an easy question like this will not be tested on the GMAT. However, it is important to understand the basics of English grammar if you are going to exceed in more advanced topics.
I hope this helps. Please ask if you have other questions