sui generis wrote:My question or call it doubt is that do the above two rules apply to all the comparators viz. "as many as", "as often as", "twice", "less/lower/better/etc. than" or are there leeways in some cases ?
these principles should apply in general. i'm hesitant to give any sort of universal guarantee, because some sort of exception can just about always be found to just about anything ... but they should apply almost all the time.
Example 2:
Twice as many apply to Harvard each year as M.I.T. ----> incorrect
Twice as many apply to Harvard each year as to M.I.T. -----> correct
Although the original sentence does not seem to have any ambiguity (as per aforementioned point 2), we added a preposition "to" to clear the meaning. Why can't we just have the noun MIT as in example 1, in which we had "my brother" as the noun without any preposition or verb.
what is the source of this example?
i don't recall seeing this example in the study hall.
this does not seem like a decision that you would have to face on the official test.
Example 3:
In the 1980's the rate of increase of the minority population of the United States was nearly twice as fast as the 1970's.
[C] twice what it was in
[E] two times greater than
Similarly in this example, which you also discussed in your video session, you eliminated E solely on the basis that it modifies noun (1970's). Here for E can't we assume (as we did in the example 1 in which we compared to a noun "my brother") that verb "was" is implicit.
that wouldn't fix the issue; the subject of this part of the comparison would still be the 1970s, not the rate of increase as required.
i.e., if you have the construction
as ... as X, then the comparison must actually involve actual "X" itself.
that's not true here -- the comparison is not between the 1980s and the 1970s; it's between a
rate in the 1980s and the corresponding
rate in the 1970s -- so the sentence would still be incorrect.
To summarize I am confused about cases in which we need to explicitly state a preposition or a verb (like in example 2 and 3) and in which we can compare it directly to a noun unambiguously (like in example 1).
i think you're making this much more difficult than it has to be. remember --
you don't have to be able to *compose* a perfect sentence. all you have to do is pick the option that is BETTER than the other options.
in these kinds of comparisons, just check the parallelism and check whether the correct things are actually being compared. then go for the choice that is
better than the other choices in this regard.
you really aren't going to find any simple rules for which words can be omitted -- but, fortunately, you don't have to! that's the beauty of multiple-choice questions.
