Shipwrecks are more likely to be found

by **BhupendraS95** Tue Dec 11, 2018 11:54 am

Sorry for digging this old thread. I am fairly confused with this thing. In the correct option, "B. than in shallow costal waters, where archaeological remains are exposed to turbulence and are accessible to anyone in scuba gear, whether", since an open parallelism marker (and) is used, the second "are" is redundant. I eliminated B on this premise. How strong is this idea of elimination. Similarly, I get confused when prepositional phrases are used in following way:
"The book can be kept on the table or on the rack". I feel the on is redundant here. Am i correct in my thinking?

by **Sage Pearce-Higgins** Sun Dec 16, 2018 7:11 am

No worries - please feel free to ask questions on old threads. Your question is a common one, and there's an easy answer. I caution my students to be very careful with the topic of redundancy and concision - these topics are rarely tested on GMAT, and looking for redundancy and concision tends to cause, rather than prevent, errors. Basically, GMAT uses redundancy in much more crude and obvious ways than simply in the addition of a potentially unnecessary preposition. A sentence such as 'Prices rose by at least 10% or more.' is clearly repetitious: the phrase 'or more' just repeats the meaning of 'at least'. So, if you're going to look for redundancy, look for something more significant than just an unnecessary 'on'.

In the case of open markers, repeating short words can actually be useful to avoid confusion. Take this example: 'Next year we're going on holiday to Palermo in Italy and France.' Now, we might get mixed up with the parallelism and think the 'and' is joining Italy and France. To make the meaning clearer, adding in an extra 'to' helps: 'Next year we're going on holiday to Palermo in Italy and to France.'

by **ZhengJ600** Thu Jan 23, 2020 2:41 am

Hi GMAT experts,

In Choice A, I understand that "they" is used incorrectly. However, is the subjective mood correct? If so, why?

In addition, would it be correct to say that "whether it be archaeologist, treasure hunter, or sport diver?"

Thank you for your help.

by **Sage Pearce-Higgins** Thu Jan 23, 2020 6:16 am

I guess you're talking about the subjunctive.

The subjunctive is quite frequent in GMAT after certain 'command' verbs, for example, 'We demand that the king surrender.' is correct. (More about this in Chapter 3 of All The Verbal Companion.) There's also the hypothetical subjunctive, which has one unusual phrase to watch out for: 'If I were rich, I would...'. We can use the subjunctive after 'whether', but the pronoun here should be 'he or she', not 'it', so the phrase 'whether it be archaeologist, treasure hunter, or sport diver'. Even though the problem doesn't test this, I would take the hint from the correct answer that GMAT 'prefers' the simpler phrase 'whether archaeologist...'.

by **ZhengJ600** Tue Jan 28, 2020 1:51 am

Sorry for the typo and many thanks for the detailed explanation.

by **Sage Pearce-Higgins** Thu Jan 30, 2020 5:26 am

You're welcome. No need to quote my previous post when you reply.

Shipwrecks are more likely to be found

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