Parallelism around "than"

[rohit.manglik]

Hi,

I went through Thursdays with Ron video "Sentence Correction: Comparison Problems" of 9th April 2015.

Can we have following constructions correct?

1) "The seat of chair A is more worn [now] than last week." (now is not mentioned)
2) "The seat of chair A is more worn [now] than it was worn last week." (now is not mentioned)

What is the GMAT way of writing this sentence?

In my opinion in 2), "it was worn last week" is an IC so it should not be correct. (25-26min in webinar)

-Rohit

[RonPurewal]

Hi,1) "The seat of chair A is more worn [now] than last week." (now is not mentioned)

this sentence should explicitly contain the word 'now'.

the item following 'than' is 'last week', so the sentence should contain 'now' (= legitimately parallel to 'last week').

[RonPurewal]

2) "The seat of chair A is more worn [now] than it was worn last week." (now is not mentioned)

if you remove 'worn' then the resulting sentence (The seat is more worn than it was last week) is legitimate.
the current version is not, though, because 'it was worn last week' is a complete sentence already. (the second half of a comparison should not make sense as a sentence by itself.)

[RonPurewal]

In my opinion in 2), "it was worn last week" is an IC so it should not be correct.

i do not know what 'ic' means.

[ShriramC110]

Hi Ron,

""the second half of a comparison should not make sense as a sentence by itself.""

Is this a general statement for all parallelism involving than??

[RonPurewal]

not necessarily. you have to dig a little deeper: the second half can't be a complete sentence that has the same meaning it has in the original comparison.

it's totally possible for the second half to be a complete sentence. e.g.,
Urban professionals buy lunch much more often than they bring it from home.
this sentence is ok.
"they bring [lunch] from home" is a sentence, of course—but that sentence has an entirely different meaning. in fact it's practically the opposite of the original comparison, whose entire point is that these people don't bring their own lunches very often.

[RonPurewal]

more importantly—don't try to learn to write comparison sentences. writing comparison sentences is deceptively difficult; even among people who have grown up with english, few can consistently write them correctly.

this is the reason why the GMAT gods have given us multiple-choice options.

https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/foru ... ml#p113659