IMO B

sumanr84 wrote:High school students with high verbal Scholastic Assessment Test scores are characterized not so much by the ability to write well than that they have a large vocabulary .

a. than that they have a large vocabulary
b. but by a large vocabulary
c. than by a large vocabulary
d. as a vocabulary that is large
e. as by a large vocabulary

[spoiler]source : kaplan cat2, OA later[/spoiler]

Idiom so X that Y

Only A and D follow this. A is better.

This question really surprised me today..give it one more try.

sumanr84 wrote:This question really surprised me today..give it one more try.

Here goes my guess again.. since it is comparing.. I will choose C

I think it's "E".

Isn't A better ?
At first i was tempted for C, but noticing the idiom i choose A.

I think its E, the idiom tested is Not so much X as Y;

There is also one idiom, Not X but Y, but in this, there is no "so much" after Not, if you had to use this then, Not so much X but so much Y ( just to keep X and Y parallel)

madhukumar_v wrote:I think its E, the idiom tested is Not so much X as Y;

There is also one idiom, Not X but Y, but in this, there is no "so much" after Not, if you had to use this then, Not so much X but so much Y ( just to keep X and Y parallel)

Bingo..Well done madhu

When I was about to pick E during my test. I thought E is incomplete because what follows "AS" should be a clause ( with its own subject+verb), but what we have here in E is prepositional phrase (beginning with "by")

Also, later half of this sentence does not make any sense to me either, even now.

Can someone pls explain this ?

Not so much X.. as Y - is the correct idiom -- by this we can come down to D and E
also both X and Y should be parallel.
Only E shows parallelism here.

not so much by the ability to write well
as by a large vocabulary

hope this helps

sumanr84 wrote:

madhukumar_v wrote:I think its E, the idiom tested is Not so much X as Y;

There is also one idiom, Not X but Y, but in this, there is no "so much" after Not, if you had to use this then, Not so much X but so much Y ( just to keep X and Y parallel)

Bingo..Well done madhu

When I was about to pick E during my test. I thought E is incomplete because what follows "AS" should be a clause ( with its own subject+verb), but what we have here in E is prepositional phrase (beginning with "by")

Also, later half of this sentence does not make any sense to me either, even now.

Can someone pls explain this ?

To answer this sentence correctly, we need two things: a correct idiom, and parallelism.

Madhukumar correctly nailed the idiom: "Not so much X as Y" as the only acceptable version--we're down to D and E.

Second, we now have a two-part construction, and the GMAT always requires that such constructions (A and B, not only M but also N, either P or Q) us parallell structure. Since the first part uses 'by' (Students...are characterized....by the ability to write well), we must do so in the second part as well (Students...are characterized...by a large vocabulary).

Not that we can use a singular characteristic to refer to multiple students, since each student has one vocabulary.