Stumped on relative quantity comparison question

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Providing initial evidence that airports are a larger source of pollution than they were once believed to be, environmentalists in Chicago reported that the total amount of pollutant emitted annually by vehicles at O'Hare International Airport is twice as much as that which is being emitted annually by all motor vehicles in the Chicago metropolitan area.

as much as that which is being emitted annually by all
as much annually as is emited by the
as much compared to what is annually emitted by all
that emitted annually by all
that emitted annually compared to the

Correct answer and my problem with it:


[spoiler]The correct answer is D. I chose A here. D is clearly the most concise and A uses some passive voice which I normally would rule out. My problem is we are comparing relative quantities here and should use 'as much as' right? Why is 'that' ok here?[/spoiler]
Last edited by jlaipple on Thu Nov 12, 2009 12:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Source: — Sentence Correction |

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by GMATBootcamp » Thu Nov 12, 2009 12:46 pm
The other answer choices were eliminated for a variety of other reasons. My reasoning is as follows:

A: incorrect. Due to the use of "which is being." We generally want to limit the number of "to be" verbs, and here we have two used in sequence - "is" and "being"

B: incorrect. The placement of "annually" no longer describes "emitted"

C: incorrect. Unidiomatic. The correct idiom is "twice as much as" or simply "twice," not "twice as much compared to." "Compared to what is" is also not concise

D: correct

E: incorrect. Redundancy error. You don't need "compared to" again


HTH!
Paul

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by jlaipple » Mon Nov 16, 2009 9:38 am
I appreciate your analysis of all the answers... I agree with everything except you don't have an explanation of why D is correct. It may be the least incorrect, but why is it correct? As i stated in the original post, I don't understand why we are comparing relative quantities and don't have to use 'as much as', which is the correct idiom as I understand it, and can use 'that'.

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by GMATBootcamp » Mon Nov 16, 2009 12:33 pm
I'm not quite understanding what you mean by "relative quantities."

In GMAT english, we need to compare apples to apples, oranges to oranges.

In the given example,
the total amount of pollutant emitted annually by vehicles at O'hare International Airport is twice as much as that which is being emitted annually by all.

The two items being compared are the amount of pollution emitted by vehicles from the airport, and the amount of pollution being emitted annually. The word "that" or some other type of pronoun or noun is required to indicate that we are correctly comparing two levels of pollution.

All of the answer choices given fulfill this comparison requirement.

To answer your second question, the use of the word "twice" already implies XX is two times the amount of YY. Using "as much as" is redundant.
Paul

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by OGMATTERS » Sun Nov 22, 2009 7:24 pm
Given two choices for this SC answer.

A: that which is being = kill it and choose B. Don't even read B to save time.

If you see that which is being it is most likely incorrect.

Generally, which should follow a comma or a preposition.
Please use the underline and spoiler buttons when posting SC questions.

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