Under the department

It's an interesting question, and it illustrates some important things about sentence correction. Many people will notice that you are given a choice between loose and loosely. Which should you choose? At this point many GMAT test takers will agonize over whether loosely is right.

Let's imagine, however, that you don't know. Are there other factors that you can look at? Certainly. A simple visual inspection shows that (B) is the shortest answer. Accordingly, it is the one most likely to be right.

Let's compare (B) to (A). (A) contains the phrase "and so" whereas (B) only contains so. Is the and necessary? Would (B) be improved if and were placed before the word so? We can see that the sentence would not be improved. Once we make this realization, we can eliminate answers (A) and (C).

What about answer choice (E)? It's the last one to contain the word loosely. Does as have the same meaning as so? Not at all. (E) changes the meaning of the sentence.

To illustrate the difference between as and so, consider these two sentences:

As John was late, he took a taxi.
John was late so he took a taxi.

In this case as introduces a reason whereas so introduces a consequence.

Without knowing whether loose or loosely was correct, we have eliminated all the choices that contain loosely. Now we can decide between (B) and (D). First of all, the word being is invariably suspect. Wouldn't this sentence be better if we changed "there being" to "there was"? I certainly think so. In addition, (D) contains a comma splice. Two sentences cannot be joined with just a comma. There must be a conjunction of some sort (and, but, or) or the comma should be replaced with a semicolon.

(B) is the best answer.