Doubt in Sentence Correction (Parallelism)

[ArchitA857]

Source: ManhattanPrep GMAT Sentence Correction guide, guide 8, 6th edition

Please consider the following two sentences from page number 85 and 87 respectively:

1> They contended that the committee was biased but that it should not be disbanded.

2> New data indicate that, over the course of the past week, the stock market jumped and the unemployment rate decreased.

In sentence 1 the "that" is used twice, before each element, but in sentence 2 the "that" is used only once. Why this disparity? To further explain my doubt, why are the following sentences wrong:

3> They contended that the committee was biased but it should not be disbanded.

4> New data indicate that, over the course of the past week, the stock market jumped and that the unemployment rate decreased.

Kindly please explain when to use "that" as part of the root phrase, and when to include it in each element of the list in parallel.

Thank you so much for your help.

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Good question! You're right to be careful about which part of the sentence to repeat - it's a classic GMAT trap and it's not always easy to see. The parallelism marker "and" is one of the hardest to check because it's an "open marker" and doesn't show precisely where the parallelism elements start and finish. Often there's more than one possible root phrase, as the example in our Interact session shows: "I would like to visit France, to climb the Eiffel tower, and to eat snails." is correct, but so is "I would like to visit France, climb the Eiffel tower, and eat snails."

Whether or not to include extra words generally depends on the meaning of the sentence. "They contended that the committee was biased but it should not be disbanded." could be considered ambiguous: is the idea that the committee should not be disbanded something that they are contending, or is it something that the author is asserting? In your example (4), the meaning is clear without repeating the "that", so that the sentence is more concise without the word "that". However, I'd be cautious and say that I don't think that GMAT would test you on examples as subtle as these.

Perhaps a good takeaway for you here is that you shouldn't worry about every sentence you read or imagine: stick to the basic rules and go for understanding the big mistakes.