more than twice as much as in the United States---> modifies Ireland which is not the purpose of the sentence. Instead there should be the use of words such as proportion which will link it to the 13% mentioned in non underlined portion of the sentence.

HTH

i think that the sentence is wrong. construction is compared with US?

I agree that the underlined portion is not idiomatic, however, GMAT Sentence Correction is only about comparing the given answer choices. Without other options, it is impossible to in the abstract look at an underlined portion and call it "right" or "wrong." I'm only posting this because it's an important strategy point: test-takers who continue to seek the "correct" answer to an SC question instead of comparing the choices will continue to struggle with the finer points of grammar without seeing as high a score increase as they could by focusing on the differences. These differences are the clue as to which issue the GMAT is really testing and only in this context is any grammar question truly helpful to improving your score!

Hi Adam:

GMATmadeEasy was reading the NY times!:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magaz ... gewanted=4

In Europe, the first round of damage came from the collapse of those real estate bubbles, which devastated employment in the peripheral economies. In 2007, construction accounted for 13 percent of total employment in both Spain and Ireland, more than twice as much as in the United States. So when the building booms came to a screeching halt, employment crashed. Overall employment fell 10 percent in Spain and 14 percent in Ireland; the Irish situation would be the equivalent of losing almost 20 million jobs here.

@AdamKnewton : I agree. Why I chose this one in particular because comparison/quantity expressions have always troubled me , and 'therefore, i am trying to fix this weakness.

@gmat1011 : you are absolutely right that it is taken from nytimes. I also undrstand that there are many errors here ans there. However, i wanted to learn out of this sentence .

Back at @AdamKnewton : Could yo upropose one way what could be the corrected sentence ?

@DeepthiRajan : I suspect that the underlined proption is trying to modify Ireland . Why ? This is not a noun modifier .

Hmm... Okay, fine, I'll take a crack at it.

Approaching this as a proofreader (I have done a fair amount of professional proofreading/editing), and not as a GMAT expert, I'd say the sentence is fine. Because "in the United States" is a prepositional phrase, it's completely clear that it's set up to be compared to "in both Spain and Ireland," so we know what the sentence means. I think if the GMAT were to give us this error, they'd give us "...more than twice as much as the United States" so that the error is more stark and therefore less debatable. Remember, the problem with debatable questions is that there won't be consistent answers among test-takers, and the question will end up being thrown out by the CAT algorithm.

One way to clarify it, from a GMAT perspective, is simply to add a pronoun to relate back to the construction: "...more than twice as much as it does in the United States." Here, "it does" would substitute for the proper comparison, "construction accounts" (subject and verb). Even this, though, is awkward; as people have pointed out above, the placement of "more than twice as much..." isn't ideal.

Usually, in this situation, the fix the GMAT will give will be to add a noun and its associated modifiers. Therefore, I think the most likely GMAT fix would be:

In 2007, construction accounted for 13 percent of total employment in both Spain and Ireland, a figure more than twice as high as that in the United States.

Now it's clear that we're comparing two numbers, the percentages, and there is no more confusion.

Once again, this isn't really a good GMAT discussion, because we're not given answer choices to compare, because I'm not sure the original sentence is objectively wrong, and because we should never predict the right answer because such prediction is rarely accurate. Nevertheless, I freely admit it was fun to attempt to fix, so, thanks

@AdamKnewton : A big thanks for your detailed reply. It really helped me.

Great explanation by Adam. Thanks a lot.