Sentence Correction Parallelism

[PallaviG700]

Manhattan GMAT Sentence correction Guide- Chapter 5 problem set - Ques 3

Many teachers choose to seek employment in the suburbs rather than facing low salaries in the city.

The answer given is rather than face. Why isn't rather than to face correct

[RahulB226]

To is spread out owing to parallelism, to seek ... rather than to face and to seek rather than face, both of them are correct. However, since GMAT loves concision shorter version has been preferred.

What I'd appreciate from Manhattan Staff is if they explain the scenarios wherein these words such as to in this case will not apply to parts after the conjunction.

[cgentry]

Since parallelism should act like mathematical distribution--2(a+b) = 2a + 2b--I can't imagine a scenario in which the item that "sits on" the parallel set would not apply to all parts of the set.

This is actually why many answers are incorrect. For example, the sentence "I will either have a hamburger or will have pizza for dinner" would be incorrect. When you 'distribute' the "I will" across the set, you end up with nonsense: I will (either) have a hamburger (or) I will will have pizza".

[cgentry]

Manhattan GMAT Sentence correction Guide- Chapter 5 problem set - Ques 3

Many teachers choose to seek employment in the suburbs rather than facing low salaries in the city.

The answer given is rather than face. Why isn't rather than to face correct

Just to confirm what the other poster wrote, either construction would be correct. And the GMAT would never require you to choose one over the other: while the GMAT explanations often say that more concise answers are preferred, I've never seen a GMAT problem where concision was actually the determining factor.

It just depends on where you define the set...and the marker is what defines the set.

Many teachers choose to seek...rather than to face... Here, the marker sits on "to face", so the set is "to seek" and "to face".

Many teachers choose to seek...rather than face... Here, the marker sits on "face" so the set is "seek" and "face".