Tip of the Day: The “Original” Sentence is Not Special
The sentence meaning expressed by the “original,” choice (A), version is not the “intended” meaning that the correct sentence version must convey. All answer choices have equal weight and should be considered equally.
Some GMAT students get the impression that the sentence in an SC question stem conveys the “true” or intended meaning of the correct sentence, or that answer choices that deviate significantly from the “original” sentence will not be correct. In reality, all answer choices should be weighed equally. Choice (A) does not set a standard for the sentence meaning or structure that must be followed by the correct answer. In fact, in many Sentence Correction questions, all five answer choices provided are quite different from one another. A correct answer choice may create a sentence version that conveys a meaning that is very different from the meaning created by choice (A), or incorporate a word or phrase that didn’t appear in choice (A) (or eliminate one that did).
So, you must resist the urge to view the meaning of the sentence in the question stem as the “real” or “correct” meaning. There is no intended meaning that the correct sentence version has to express. The correct version will be the one that most effectively expresses a logical meaning.
