Sentence Correction

Hey Jaguar,

Thanks for asking...I'll probably start a new thread with this, too, so that people don't have to find it in the middle of this thread, but as a direct response...

1) Does this change mean that Idioms will 100% not be tested?

I think that's a two-part question. The first answer: Idioms will certainly APPEAR on the GMAT. You can't really avoid them, as idioms are basically just "accepted forms of speech". So don't see an idiom on the GMAT and immediately think "Brian and Dr. Rudner were lying!!!". There will be idioms, just as my post here will contain plenty of idioms.

But the second part of that answer is most important: The GMAT will not explicitly test idioms. Questions will not hinge on whether you know the correct idiom - there will always be another valid reason to choose or eliminate an answer choice. A choice with a correct idiom will need to also have a correct or incorrect verb tense or S-V agreement or other major category to it in order to make it a valid answer choice. So while you might SEE idioms, you DO NOT NEED TO KNOW idioms. And this has been the case for years now. As an example, see one of my favorite questions:

Immanuel Kant's writings, while praised by many philosophers for their brilliance and consistency, are characterized by sentences so dense and convoluted
as to pose a significant hurdle for many readers interested in his works.

A. so dense and convoluted as to pose
B. so dense and convoluted they posed
C. so dense and convoluted that they posed
D. dense and convoluted enough that they posed
E. dense and convoluted enough as they pose

This is a VERB TENSE question that happens to feature an idiom, but the idiom is the smokescreen here. You want to see "so X that Y", but check the verb in C - it's past-tense when, logically, there's no reason to believe that this challenge has ended for readers. The verb "pose" needs to be used, and that corresponds to the less-common-but-still-correct idiom "so X as to Y" in choice A, the correct answer. Here, the idiom is the trap...if you accept that you're not great with idioms (there are tens of thousands of them...you'll never learn them all), then you'll look for the things you know well (verb tenses, S-V agreement, pronoun agreement, etc.). And you'll do well. But if you try to master every idiom under the sun, you'll overlook the main category stuff that you could do well.

(business aside - think of Yahoo and its current woes as a tech company. It's doing "idioms" - trying to be everything to everyone without doing any 2-3 things well - while Google has mastered search and maps; Facebook has mastered social networking; etc. Those companies that figure out the handful of things they do extremely well - their core competencies - succeed, and those that constantly reinvent and contort themselves trying to be a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none tend to fail. That, in a way, is what SC is testing)

So I guess as a summarized answer to that...you will see idioms on the test but you won't be tested on them. And knowing that is a pretty nice step toward success.


2) What about the rest of the error categories?

These are exactly what the GMAT tests. Your core competencies. And if you look deeper, you'll find that these are often just as much logical as they are "grammatical". Using an improper modifier is illogical. You can't say:

Leaving my house this morning, the traffic was surprisingly light.

The traffic didn't leave my house - grammatically that's a misplaced modifier, but logically it's just an incorrect thought...it doesn't make sense.

Similarly, incorrect verb tenses create illogical timelines and incorrect comparisons are illogical in that you could never actually compare those things. What you can do, in fact, is break down the error categories to more logical bases:

Numerical Agreement (pronouns, S-V)
Logical Agreement (Modifiers, Comparisons)
Logical Validity (Verb Tenses)
Clarity (does this sentence even exist as a full thought - the semicolon, etc. type grammatical things)

Most (if not all) of those you can figure out by thinking critically/logically even if you haven't memorized grammar rules or can't define a gerund or participle. The GMAT is a REASONING test and you'll find that the questions are written really well to accomplish that. Those other error categories (nonidioms) give you opportunities to think and not just "know", so those will remain. That's the crux of what they're really testing.


3) The 3/2 split - is that still a viable strategy?

Definitely - it obviously won't work on every question because the test could quite easily create 3-4 errors and mix them through the answer choices, but the 3/2 split will still work in many cases as a great tool for identifying one error and rooting it out in multiple answer choices efficiently.

rghoshal wrote:Hi Brian,

Can you pls explain why option 5 is not correct for question 2 ?

Thanks,

Option 5 in question #2 is incorrect because the subject is Neanderthals and not the vocal tracts.. If we use 'vocal tracts' as the subject it would mean that vocal tracts were probably without language -- which is illogical.

Hence the correct answer is B