Princeton Verbal Review

[Guest]

Local residents claim that San Antonio, Texas, has more good Mexican American restaurants than any city does in the United States.

(A) any city does

(B) does any other city

(C) other cities do

(D) any city

(E) other cities

[RonPurewal]

once again, the all-purpose process-of-elimination filter. in the future, please try to accompany your posts with specific questions; it's unlikely that you're totally clueless about the problem, so you can save us time by telling us what you already know.

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any city ... in the United States: two things about this one.
- you must include the word 'other', because san antonio is a u.s. city. if you don't say 'other', then you imply that san antonio somehow manages to have more good m.a. restaurants than any u.s. city - including san antonio!
- you can't split this construction up; 'any other city in the united states' must appear in one piece. (if you say '...any city does in the u.s.', the literal interpretation is that you're talking about what those cities do when they're in the u.s.; since cities don't travel in and out of countries, that's absurd.)

the above considerations kill choices a, c, and d, leaving b and e.

choice e is bad for two reasons:
- it distorts the meaning of the original, weakening its claim from one of superiority over all other american cities to one of superiority of some selected group of cities.
- read literally, it presents an ambiguity: (1) san antonio's restaurants > other cities' restaurants, vs (2) san antonio's restaurants > san antonio's other cities. obviously #2 is absurd, but it's still technically an ambiguity, and technical ambiguities (even if easily resolvable by 'common sense') are grounds for ruling out an answer choice.

that leaves b.

[bruno.shinjo]

Can you please clarify on this usage of "does"? I'm thinking that parallelism would require "has any other city", instead. Thanks!

[RonPurewal]

Can you please clarify on this usage of "does"? I'm thinking that parallelism would require "has any other city", instead. Thanks!

you would only put "has" if it were a helping verb.
i.e., if the original verb was "has done", "has given", "has chosen" or, in general, "has VERBed", then putting another "has" would be appropriate.

here, though, "has" is actually the main verb -- not a helping verb -- so it's parallel with "does".

[divuu.verma]

Hi Ron,

What is the difference between " other" and "any other" in choice B & C?

Thanks,
Divya

[RonPurewal]

the choices with the plural noun ('cities') don't have 'any', because 'any' is singular. there's no significant difference in terms of the comparison.

[RonPurewal]

in any case, to have an 'apples-to-apples' comparison, we definitely want "San Antonio" (one city) vs. "any other city" (= compared to one other city at a time).

if you want, you can think about the meaning issue created by the plural 'cities' (it seems to pit san anonio's restaurant scene against that of all other cities combined). that issue does not exist with the singular ("any other city").

...or, if you don't want to think that much, you can just realize that 'one city || one city' is a good parallel comparison, whereas 'one city || multiple cities' is not (unless the sentence very specifically indicates that we actually are comparing a single city to a whole bunch of others combined).