SC : Crack-GMAT Test Q

[RonPurewal]

2) “prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus was the Incan highway,”
There is the singular verb that I’m looking for: “was the Incan highway.” The meaning makes sense: The greatest road system was the Incan Highway. That is the core of the sentence.

…but there’s more.

it’s dangerous to make judgments about the whole sentence if you’ve only read half of it.

4) ”over 2,500 miles long and extending from northern Ecuador through Peru to Southern Chile.”
Here comes the problem: is “2500 miles” suppose to referr to the “the greatest road system” or “Incan Highway”? To me, both make sense.

the blue thing is perfectly reasonable.

you know what this means, right?
if you said “…then don’t eliminate either of them”, you win!

quite often there are multiple different ways to write a sentence.
there might be differences of style, or emphasis, or other things that writers have to think about… but those things are not tested on this exam.

[RonPurewal]

Second, problem: does “2500 miles” need to be parallel with “extending” or is the “extending” modifying “2500 miles”? Again, both meanings could work but I think since it is talking about a specific distance 2500 miles, “extending” is probably going to modify “2500 miles”. But I’m not 100% certain, at this point.

it’s not just “2500 miles”. it’s “2500 miles long”. this is a DESCRIPTION (modifier) of the highway.
so, if it is parallel to something, it definitely must be parallel to some other description of the highway.

incidentally, when you see “2500 miles long” vs. “2500 miles in length”, you can confidently eliminate the latter, because it is objectively worse than the former.
i wrote about this here:
https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/foru ... ml#p118104

[RonPurewal]

incidentally, that ^^ decides between your final pair (B/E). furthermore, it's very objective, and it's very quick.

so, if there's a single most important takeaway here, it is this: Don't neglect relative judgments (especially when they are quick and straightforward).

the structure of B is not great, as i'll discuss below, but it's not a coincidence that "...in length" has been inserted into precisely those places where it's hardest to make absolute judgments.

[RonPurewal]

incidentally…

Now, lets go through the answer choices. I know for certain that “,which,” in (A) is wrong, so that is the initial split that I’m going to use. (D) “being over 2,500” is also wrong. I spot that error because I was looking through all the answer choices that repeat the “,which,” in (A). So, now I’m left with (B), (C), and (E). Let’s focus on the core of the sentence because every correct sentence needs a subject and verb. (C) and (E) do not have a main verb to connect “the greatest road system” to “the Incan Highway.” So, they are probably wrong. Wait a second, is the “the greatest road system” a subject or a modifier? Both possibilities are viable. Now, things are getting really complicated because of all these options. I’m not sure about the split in the front and the back of the sentence. Let’s first eliminate (C) because it does not have any verb. I’m left with (B) and (E).

i was unable to read this ‘paragraph’ because there are no line breaks.
i understand that you’re left with B/E at the end, and you are probably correct about the rest… but i can’t really read the rest. i tried. i couldn’t.

fun fact about ron: i am dyslexic. i have a hard time reading words in a straight line. if a bunch of unrelated ideas are jammed together into a giant wall of text, then the probability that i’ll be able to understand it is zero.

(i can understand paragraphs that have a main idea—such as those in RC passages, and in virtually any book or magazine—because ‘darting around a cloud of words’ is my brain’s normal way of reading.
but there MUST be line breaks between different ideas, or else i don’t have a chance.)

fyi.

[RonPurewal]

The main core in (B) is “the greatest road system was the Incan Highway and it extended from one location to another”. In contrast, the core in (E) is “the Incan highway was over 2,500 miles.” To me, both interpretations are valid to be the main emphasis of the sentence. Let’s just guess to move on, because I already spent a long time on this question.

at the risk of redundancy, the first thing to know here is that you don’t have to think about this, since you’ve been given a convenient relative judgment.

beyond that, there’s one more relationship that you should have noticed in ‘step 1’:
”2500 miles long” and “extending from place x to place y” are describing exactly the same thing (= the length/extent of the road).
therefore, one of them should modify the other one. it is nonsense to present them as two separate ideas.

thus choice B is nonsense, because “2500 miles long” is on one side of the word ‘and’, but “extended from x to y” is on the other side.

in the correct answer, note that one of these things is modifying the other, exactly as required.

[RonPurewal]

finally

––– YOU WON’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS ON THE EXAM (although it might help) –––

ok, so, in this sort of situation, you can also just appeal to your common sense. if two things are connected by ‘and’, they should make sense as bullet points on a powerpoint slide… or as #1 and #2 in a numbered list… or whatever.

so, ask yourself whether these two bullets make sense:
• …was the incan highway
• …extended from place x to place y

i bet not. (DO NOT try to analyze why not. this is a huge unsolved problem in artificial intelligence.)
if you had to make something like this, it would probably look like this instead:
1/ incan highway
….. a/ greatest road system in the americas
….. b/ extended from place x to place y
ok, now THAT makes sense.
it happens be different from the correct answer here, but such is life (most sentences can be written in a variety of ways).

––– YOU WON’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THIS ON THE EXAM (although it might help) –––

[RonPurewal]

I end up spending 2:12 on one SC question.

okay...
this is not the end of the world. it's longer than average... but lots of things (probably right around %50 of them) will be longer than average.

the only thing to think about, here, is whether you wasted any time staring at things you couldn't resolve.
if you did waste any such time, then that's ... well, wasted time. (:
if you did not, then this is just one of those problems that takes longer than the average time, and it is what it is.

[ErikM442]

I can't digest E. For me it looks like a major run-on sentence. The greatest road system built, the Incan highway was over 2500 miles long.

Can someone please explain how it's not a run-on. When I did my mock test I immediately crossed this one off.

The "the Incan highway" is what bothers me. I get it if I remove that, but it feels like saying "The fastest runner in the world, Usain Bolt ran X in Y sec"

[RonPurewal]

"The fastest runner in the world, Usain Bolt ran X in Y sec"

...and that's a perfectly respectable sentence, too.

a noun+modifier(s) ("The fastest runner in the world") can perfectly well serve as an opening modifier.
this is no different from writing
Usain Bolt, the fastest runner in the world, can run X meters in Y seconds,
except in that the modifier comes in front of "Usain Bolt" rather than behind it.

[RonPurewal]

also, really, do your homework with these things!

if you see a construction that you find strange, go look for it in the official problems! you'll be able to answer a LOT of your own questions that way.

e.g., if you flip through the items in OG 2016, you'll come across SC #120, which also has this type of construction.

[amardeeps400]

B. Columbus was the Incan highway, over 2,500 miles in length, and extended
-the use of extended in the absence of which was is incorrect; the proper construction should be extending (as extended gives the impression that the road was intentionally lengthened rather than simply existing between two points).

Dear experts,

I chose E for this problem, but I still don't quite understand why B is wrong.

I thought that "and extended" in B was parallel to "was" and acted as another main verb, and that "over 2500 miles in length" was a modifier that gives more info about the Incan highway. That is, I thought the skeleton of B was "the greatest road system ... was the Incan highway... and extended..."

Why is this thinking incorrect? Please help clarify. Thanks in advance!

Hi Ron

My brother is Ron and teaches the GMAT. --> I this sentence correct from gmat point of view??

[RonPurewal]

that EXACT sentence is already discussed on the previous page, in copious detail.

in fact, i'm a little confused. you must have seen that discussion -- there's no way you would have made up this sentence at random -- yet you're asking the same question that has already been answered, by the discussion that you already saw.
hm?

beyond what i've already said about this (on page 5 of this thread), i don't really have anything to add.

[SahilS462]

Hi ,


Please help me with my confusion here, sorry for enabling such a old thread but then old is gold.

Hope you take this up.

In B and D
(B) The greatest road system was the Incan highway and extended from Ecuador to Chile.
(D) Columbus, the Incan highway, being over 2,500 miles in length, was extended

*extended* here is VERB-ED MODIFIER or a VERB. Since there is no subject which is doing "extended" hence i think it is a MODIFIER and not a VERB.

Can you please confirm this?

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

No worries; it's a good problem.

*extended* here is VERB-ED MODIFIER or a VERB. Since there is no subject which is doing "extended" hence i think it is a MODIFIER and not a VERB.

I'd be interested to hear your reasons for making that judgement, but I think you're incorrect. Remember that '-ed' words can have lots of different functions, and we need to read other clues in the sentence to decide which role a certain '-ed' word is playing.

First of all, if I add some form of the verb 'to be', then I definitely make it a verb (a passive one). For example, 'The dinner was cooked.' This applies to answer D. We run into a meaning problem here, since it's incorrect to say that 'the highway was extended', as if some other agent was stretching the highway out. We'd say 'the highway extended' as an active verb.

We can know that '-ed' words are modifiers as they'll usually be set off by commas. For example: 'Tired from his run, Sage lay on the sofa.' Here we've got a clear modifier 'tired from his run'. This is also a passive construction in that it was the run that tired Sage out. Answer B doesn't have a comma, so that we have two verbs joined by 'and' to make a parallel construction: '...the Incan highway was... and extended....'

[thanghnvn]

thank you Ron
from your posting , i can conclude that
it is hard to realize that two grammatically parallel items connected by "and" are not parallel logically. this case is tested often on gmat.

if we see a split between "and" which show grammatical parallelism and "no and" which shows modifier relation, check the logic parallelism. anticipate this case make it more easy for us to realize gramatical parallelism is not logic . choice B ilustrate my point.