"Despite the fact that"

by **tim** Thu Oct 04, 2012 9:27 am

no. "crowd" is a collective noun, which means it takes on an identity different from its constituent parts. if you talk about a "young girl and her family", you would use the pronoun "they" to convey the separate nature of the individuals involved. thus the individuals (at least the girl) retain their personhood and are referred to with "who". when you talk of a crowd you are referring to an entity that is an "it" rather than "they", and thus we have a new singular entity that has its own identity separate from the humans that comprise the crowd. thus you would use a "that" rather than "who"..

by **p111** Thu Oct 04, 2012 10:35 am

Got it !!
Thanks Tim :)

by **jnelson0612** Thu Oct 04, 2012 9:53 pm

p111 Wrote:Got it !!
Thanks Tim :)

Great! :-)

by **aditya8062** Mon Feb 11, 2013 7:47 am

can Ron plz confirm me on following points :
"despite" is a preposition and hence sud be followed by a noun or a noun phrase .now because gerunds functions like noun so "despite" can be followed by gerunds
so despite entering the court house ..... sud be considered right
coz entering the court house ....is a gerund

similarly "despite their entering the court house....." can be considered right coz "their entering the court house" is something like noun (not sure if it gerund ),though i will still not pick this kind of phrase coz i remember one post of Ron in which he explicitly says that "possessive + verbing" are awkward .

also "despite the fact that ..." is right coz here despite is followed by "noun phrase "

when i tried this question i picked E thinking that "entering the court house ...." is a simple gerund hence it can go good with "despite " but i guess this question is actually testing a pronoun error (which incidently i missed thinking that pronoun error is trivial issue )
thanks and regards

by **tim** Mon Feb 11, 2013 1:35 pm

take a look at the official explanation on this one and i think your confusion about "despite" will be resolved - or maybe you'll just find it more confusing. at any rate, i strongly recommend dealing with pronouns to eliminate E on this one because they are far easier to deal with..

by **aditya8062** Mon Feb 11, 2013 11:07 pm

tim Wrote:take a look at the official explanation on this one and i think your confusion about "despite" will be resolved - or maybe you'll just find it more confusing. at any rate, i strongly recommend dealing with pronouns to eliminate E on this one because they are far easier to deal with..

thank u Tim . but i dont have official explanation of this problem. i do agree with u that i sud have spotted the pronoun errors in this problem but u see its becomes very difficult for novice like me to crack within 2 min as to which error is really tested .
Tim can u plz tell me if my thinking is correct in the phrases that i have posted (one post above this )
thanks and regards

by **jlucero** Sat Feb 16, 2013 8:35 pm

Three big things:

1) I'd spend all of 10 seconds thinking about that issue on the GMAT before moving onto something more meaningful. There's a lot more important stuff in this sentence to be spending time during the test thinking about whether "entering" is a gerund or verb.

2) I think some of the comments above seem to indicate our instructors disagree on the usage of entering. I'm in the camp that this "entering the courthouse with police escort" is not a gerund phrase, as "the courthouse" is the object of the verb "entering". On top of that, entering the courthouse is a process and not a thing, leading me to believe this would not be used on the GMAT.

3) Echoing my first point above- don't focus on just one area on a real question if there are other issues. If I could find no other differences between B & E (but there are definitely some in this case), I'd go with B, because I've never seen E's structure used in a correct answer.

by **aditya8062** Sun Feb 17, 2013 3:39 am

jlucero wrote :

I'm in the camp that this "entering the courthouse with police escort" is not a gerund phrase

if above is correct plz justify the following two uses of this phrase("entering the court house .....) :
i was entering the courthouse with the police escort ---i feel that here "was entering " has been used as verb

entering the courthouse with police escort is an esteemed thing ----i feel here this phrase "entering the court house " is acting as noun

now when a phrase is sometimes acting like a noun and sometimes as a verb then it must be a gerund --in fact a simple gerund

now i reiterate my doubt : if the phrase " entering the court house ...." is indeed a gerund then why cant this phrase follow the preposition "despite"
thanks and regards

by **tim** Thu Feb 28, 2013 12:11 pm

i think it has been made overwhelmingly clear to you that our instructors either don't consider this a problem or don't consider it important enough to worry about. please take a lesson from that and stop wasting your time on an issue that is not worth your time and that several of us agree with you about already!

by **benjamindian** Sun May 18, 2014 11:44 am

The explanation to this question hasn't been updated in the SC question bank. It still says that "despite eating an apple..." is wrong.

by **tim** Fri Jun 20, 2014 2:45 am

Thank you for alerting everyone to that fact. Unfortunately those of us on the forums do not have control over what is in the database so we cannot change it for you.

"Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"

Re: "Despite the fact that"