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Redundancy and Concision

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Redundancy and Concision

by [email protected] » Sun Dec 02, 2012 6:35 am
Despite the recent election of a woman to the office of prime minister, the status of women in Pakistan is little changed from how it was in the last century.

[A] is little changed from how it was

is a little change from how it was

[C] has changed little

[D] has changed little from how it has been

[E] is little changed from the way it was


The given OA is C.


Just the way you have other redundant cases, you have one more added to that list.

The use of past perfect = one leg in the past and one leg in the present

has changed little = is changed from how it was or what it was

They both mean the same, but because 'has changed' is concise, it is the correct answer.

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by JaneCassie » Mon Dec 03, 2012 2:42 pm
I actually don't think the answer here comes from concision. The answer in Sentence Correction is almost never because of concision; however, concise statements do sometimes also remove grammatical problems such as tautology or misuse.

The problem with A and E is that "little" is incorrectly being used to modify "changed", which is used as an adjective (a predicate nominative) here. Think of the sentence, "She is short." You cannot say, "She is little short." You'd have to say, "She is a little short."

B seems to fix our problem, except that by switching from "changed" to "change", we've had an unintended and unjustifiable change in meaning. B says that "the status" is "a little change", which is not what we mean. We mean that the status has not changed very much.

We are left with C and D, which both use "has changed little" correctly. Now, "little" is being used to modify the VERB "has changed." D, however, can be eliminated because, as you say, the verb tense "has been" is wrong. The last century is a particular time in the past, so there's no reason to use past perfect here, because we're not benchmarking a time in the past against something else in the past.
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