The president of France and the President of USA

[anusuthakaran]

In Action Problem Set - Grammar Meaning and Concision.

Q. The press release claims that the France President is older than the United States.

The correction given : The press release claims that the president of France is older than THAT of United States.

My doubt is - we should avoid using 'THAT' when refering to people - shouldnt the correction be ' older than the president of United States. '. The repetition might be necessary.

[StaceyKoprince]

the word "that" actually refers to the title or position: "president." It's perfectly fine to refer to a title or position with the pronoun "that." Be very literal in testing the replacement word - the word in question is simply "president." No name is included. [The sentence doesn't say "President Sarkozy of France is older than that of the US." If that were the case, then "that" would refer to "President Sarkozy" and that would obviously be wrong because he's not the president of the US!]

You can also repeat the title rather than use the pronoun ("the president of the US") but you aren't required to - and on harder GMAT questions, they won't give the "nice-sounding" option. They'll give the "that of" / weird-sound option so that some people cross it off simply because they think it sounds bad.

[anusuthakaran]

I get your point, but it raises another doubt.
How can a role/position of France be older than that of US ?
Isn't it creating a logical problem? Isn't the intention of the sentence to say that the French President is older than the American President ?

Thnx,
Anu.

[StaceyKoprince]

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, the intention is to say that the person currently holding that role in one country is older than the person currently holding that role in another country.

Because the form of the word is "president" and not the person, it is okay to use the pronoun "that" to refer back to the word president (your original question was that we should not be able to use "that" because we are talking about a person). That's just a grammatical construction based on the fact that it says the generic "president" rather than a specific president's name.

At the same time, you can also assume that the ages we're discussing are the ages of the two people who are currently filling the role of president in those two countries.

You can also repeat the word president if you want - but you don't have to, and the test will never ask you to make a distinction between "that of" and repeating the word "president" (in a case like this one) because either option is okay.