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hawthorne works of the western electric

by gmat2010 » Sun Sep 14, 2008 4:15 pm
In the mid-1920s the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company was the scene of an intensive series of experiments that would investigate changes in working conditions as to their effects on workers' performance.

a) that would investigate changes in working conditions as to their effects on workers' performance

b) investigating the effects that changes in working conditions would have on workers' performance.

c) for investigating what the effects on workers' performance are that changes in working conditions would cause

d) that investigated changes in working conditions' effects on workers' performance

e) to investigate what the effects changes in working conditions would have on workers' performance


please explain your answers..thx.
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by lunarpower » Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:12 am
(b) is the best choice here.

(a) is vague because it's overly indirect: the meaning of "investigate changes ... as to their effects" is unclear. what's more, it's probably considered unidiomatic as well, at least in this sort of context.

(b) = correct
the participle "investigating" follows "experiments" immediately. no filler words are necessary; this is good concision.
the wording is clear; there are no awkward double possessives, etc., as in some of the other choices.
"would" is used properly here, as a past-tense form of "will". (i.e., if this sentence were translated into the present tense, it would read "...that changes ... will have")

(c) is ridiculously wordy; there's no way you should give this choice any serious consideration. if you don't realize pretty quickly that this choice is wrong, you should go back and read through a bunch of correct OG answers, trying to internalize the sights and sounds (the "vibe") of the correct answers.

(d) "changes in working conditions' effects" is at best awkward and vague, and at worst ambiguous: the intended meaning is the effects of the changes, but this sentence seems to indicated the effects of the conditions themselves. in other words, a literal reading of this sentence seems to indicate that the conditions themselves haven't changed - only their effects have. that's not the intended meaning of the original.

(e) "what the effects" is ungrammatical.
also, in constructions of this sort, "what" is generally redundant / unnecessary; it's better merely to say "to investigate X" rather than to say "to investigate what X is" (or other such wordy construction).
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by san2009 » Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:25 am
thanks ron!
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by loveusonu » Sat Jun 12, 2010 12:59 pm
lunarpower wrote:(b) is the best choice here.

(a) is vague because it's overly indirect: the meaning of "investigate changes ... as to their effects" is unclear. what's more, it's probably considered unidiomatic as well, at least in this sort of context.

(b) = correct
the participle "investigating" follows "experiments" immediately. no filler words are necessary; this is good concision.
the wording is clear; there are no awkward double possessives, etc., as in some of the other choices.
"would" is used properly here, as a past-tense form of "will". (i.e., if this sentence were translated into the present tense, it would read "...that changes ... will have")

(c) is ridiculously wordy; there's no way you should give this choice any serious consideration. if you don't realize pretty quickly that this choice is wrong, you should go back and read through a bunch of correct OG answers, trying to internalize the sights and sounds (the "vibe") of the correct answers.

(d) "changes in working conditions' effects" is at best awkward and vague, and at worst ambiguous: the intended meaning is the effects of the changes, but this sentence seems to indicated the effects of the conditions themselves. in other words, a literal reading of this sentence seems to indicate that the conditions themselves haven't changed - only their effects have. that's not the intended meaning of the original.

(e) "what the effects" is ungrammatical.
also, in constructions of this sort, "what" is generally redundant / unnecessary; it's better merely to say "to investigate X" rather than to say "to investigate what X is" (or other such wordy construction).
Ron, I was confused between B and E, but I went to E because 'investigating' is a present participle and can modify the 2 subjects before it. Hence I thought it might be ambiguous. Am I correct on this one. What the rule over here?

Sorry, I am a Native speaker.. So wanted to understand why "what the effects" is ungramatical.
Is it that What + verb is only correct. for eg. "What are the effects..." . whats the basic grammer rule over here?
Sonu
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by lunarpower » Mon Jun 14, 2010 3:49 am
loveusonu wrote:Sorry, I am a Native speaker.. So wanted to understand why "what the effects" is ungramatical.
Is it that What + verb is only correct. for eg. "What are the effects..." . whats the basic grammer rule over here?
off the top of my head, there are three acceptable ways to make a clause that begins with "what".

1) you can have "what" + verb (+ possibly other words), as you've noted. in this case, "what" is the subject of the verb:
i don't know what happened last night

OR
2) you can have "what" + subject + verb (+ possibly other words). in this case, "what" is the object of the verb:
i don't know what my brother said when i was gone
i saw what the kids did to the house (--> this one looks sort of like the construction in choice (e), but notice that they are actually completely different)

OR
3) you can have "what" + noun. (in this case i'm not exactly sure what part of speech "what" counts as, but it seems to play a role closest to that of an adjective)
i don't know what effects the oil spill will have on the environment
this is probably the construction that is closest to the incorrect one in choice (e), but notice that in this case it is absolutely not ok to insert "the" between "what" and the noun.

there may be other uses of "what", but i can't think of them off the top of my head at this moment. in any case, there is no such construction as the one used in choice (e).
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by martin.jonson007 » Mon Jun 14, 2010 4:29 am
Ron's explanations are great as usual....

but sometimes too heavy to digest for a person like me ... :)

wud like 2 see comments in simple launguage on what makes B more preferable over E
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by loveusonu » Mon Jun 14, 2010 11:55 am
martin.jonson007 wrote:Ron's explanations are great as usual....

but sometimes too heavy to digest for a person like me ... :)

wud like 2 see comments in simple launguage on what makes B more preferable over E
Summarizing from Ron's discussion:

In E, "What the effects changes..." is ungrammatical because
1>Try removing "what" the sentence is able to convey its intended meaning. Hence violates redundant.
2>"the effects": use of 'the' means 'effects' are mentioned earlier and we refer to the same, and that is certainly not the case.

Ron, Correct me if I went wrong.
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by loveusonu » Mon Jun 14, 2010 12:02 pm
lunarpower wrote:
loveusonu wrote:Sorry, I am a Native speaker.. So wanted to understand why "what the effects" is ungramatical.
Is it that What + verb is only correct. for eg. "What are the effects..." . whats the basic grammer rule over here?
off the top of my head, there are three acceptable ways to make a clause that begins with "what".

1) you can have "what" + verb (+ possibly other words), as you've noted. in this case, "what" is the subject of the verb:
i don't know what happened last night

OR
2) you can have "what" + subject + verb (+ possibly other words). in this case, "what" is the object of the verb:
i don't know what my brother said when i was gone
i saw what the kids did to the house (--> this one looks sort of like the construction in choice (e), but notice that they are actually completely different)

OR
3) you can have "what" + noun. (in this case i'm not exactly sure what part of speech "what" counts as, but it seems to play a role closest to that of an adjective)
i don't know what effects the oil spill will have on the environment
this is probably the construction that is closest to the incorrect one in choice (e), but notice that in this case it is absolutely not ok to insert "the" between "what" and the noun.

there may be other uses of "what", but i can't think of them off the top of my head at this moment. in any case, there is no such construction as the one used in choice (e).
Thanks Ron for an excellent summary on 'What'. I just realized it can used as a subject, conjunction and something like adjective as well. :)

But still, the major Error, I feel, in B is "investigating" modifying ambiguously either the Hawthorne works or experiments(intended one). How is this option given green signal?
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by lunarpower » Thu Jun 17, 2010 3:36 am
loveusonu wrote:But still, the major Error, I feel, in B is "investigating" modifying ambiguously either the Hawthorne works or experiments(intended one). How is this option given green signal?
it can't apply to "hawthorne works"; that's too far away. these NO COMMA + -ING modifiers generally modify the immediately preceding noun or noun phrase.

interestingly, there is somewhat of an ambiguity here, in that the modifier could be attributed either to "series (of experiments)" or to "experiments".
however, this is not a genuine ambiguity, as there's no real difference in meaning between (a) a SERIES of experiments that IS meant to investigate something and (b) a series of EXPERIMENTS that ARE meant to investigate something; these are pretty much exactly the same thing.

there's a slight quibble as to whether the experiments are viewed by the speaker as parts of a cohesive whole (a) or as individual components (b), but that sort of thing is purely rhetorical and is thus way, way beyond the ken of this exam.
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by lunarpower » Thu Jun 17, 2010 3:46 am
loveusonu wrote:In E, "What the effects changes..." is ungrammatical because
1>Try removing "what" the sentence is able to convey its intended meaning. Hence violates redundant.
this is not a redundancy issue; "redundant" implies that the construction is perfectly grammatical, but needlessly repetitive.

this construction is definitely not grammatically acceptable, so the issue of redundancy -- which is something that needs to be considered only if the sentence is grammatically correct -- does not figure into this choice.

(i don't know how to classify this grammar error; i just know that it's an error.
the non-erroneous uses of "what" are listed above.)
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by lunarpower » Thu Jun 17, 2010 3:46 am
2>"the effects": use of 'the' means 'effects' are mentioned earlier and we refer to the same, and that is certainly not the case.

Ron, Correct me if I went wrong.
nope. if you classify "the" as incorrect, you'll actually eliminate the OA.

the gmat does not explicitly test the use of articles (a/an/the). i have never seen an official problem requiring this knowledge, nor do i anticipate seeing one anytime soon.
this is probably a measure to make sure that east asian, slavic, and/or finnish people -- whose languages don't have articles -- are not unfairly disadvantaged relative to other foreign speakers.
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by Jayanth2689 » Sat Aug 18, 2012 6:11 am
had to reopen this because i got this question on GMAT Prep 1! I understood this question to have a meaning issue and eliminated A & D, because the EFFECTS are being investigated and not the CHANGES.

This left me with B,C & E. C was too wordy and awkward compared to the other two.

And finally between B & E, chose B because "effects that" seemed better than "what the effects"

Would like to know if this approach was better than squeezing my brain over the correct verb tense for "investigate" !

Thanks!
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by hjafferi » Sun Aug 19, 2012 12:01 pm
My take on this question is

IMO B

A) what does their refer to " changes" or " working condition"
B) correct answer
C) wordy. Also experiments here is a noun. Therefore use of for would be incorrect
D) wordy..
E) almost always use of what in the middle of the sentence is wrong...
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by crisro » Mon Sep 03, 2012 6:46 pm
I avoided B because I thought a comma was missing in front of investigating.
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by lunarpower » Tue Sep 04, 2012 6:19 am
crisro wrote:I avoided B because I thought a comma was missing in front of investigating.
nope. if you want "investigating" to describe the noun in front of it, it's actually obligatory not to have a comma there (unless the comma belongs to some other, unrelated construction).
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