study published in The New England Journal of Medicine - SC

[RonPurewal]

with all due respect:
Ron, you stated in many posts that the article is not the issue that GMAT tests in SC, if there is an article error, there will be some other error to help us to determine the correct answer,
but according to this official problem, GMAT eventually tests the article solely. except the article use there isn't any significant difference between choice A and B?

what i mean by that statement is that the idiomatic usages of "a/an/the" are not going to be tested. if you have an instance in which the presence or absence of an article fundamentally changes the meaning of the resulting construction -- as in this case -- then that could be fair game.
another instance of this kind of phenomenon is the presence or absence of "the" in front of a number. for instance, if you say "bob and jim are the two witnesses to the crime", then you are implying that bob and jim are the only two witnesses. however, if you say "bob and jim are two witnesses...", then there very well could be more than two. (this difference may factor into e.g. the interpretation of critical reasoning problems.)

on the other hand, i do feel compelled to ask -- do we have actual verification that this is an official problem? anyone have a screenshot?

[llzzyy234]

I make the right choice, but I don't understand why D and E is out.

1. Is "at the prevention of ..." or "at preventing ..." wrong?
2. I don't think "as ... as" must be followed a "do". I think it depends on if this sentence makes ambiguity.
For example:
I have as many apples as you.

For the example here:
post33237.html#p33237
i know more about shakespeare than my brother does.
The "does" must be there, otherwise there will be an ambiguity.

Is this sentence right?
Drug A works just as well as Drug B.

[tim]

Your example sentence is fine. D and E are wrong because you don’t work "at preventing" or "at the prevention of" something. You work "to prevent" something..

[zhongshanlh]

what is wrong with c?
why cann't we use "will" to represent "will (prevent)"???

[RonPurewal]

what is wrong with c?
why cann't we use "will" to represent "will (prevent)"???

even if you can, there's a clear lack of parallelism there. you're talking about a comparison between the performances of two different drugs -- in exactly the same timeframe -- so the use of 2 different tenses doesn't fly.

if the second part of the sentence were talking about a drug that hasn't yet been developed, then the switch to the future tense could be legitimate.
for instance:
aspirin prevents xxxxxx better than Drug Y will
... if Drug Y is something that hasn't been fully developed/marketed yet.

that's not the case in this sentence, which makes it clear that the second drug is already "commonly used". so the tense switch is bad news bears.

[ikuta.yamahashi]

Your example sentence is fine. D and E are wrong because you don’t work "at preventing" or "at the prevention of" something. You work "to prevent" something..

Dear instructor:

I cannot understand why D is wrong.
IMO, Aspirin work as well as XXX at the prevention of zzz. this sentence is unambiguous in meaning.
I find a official example using this pattern
x are more efficient than y at acquiring carbon.
So, why Aspirin work as well as XXX at the prevention of zzz is wrong?

Could you please help me
Your Yama

[RonPurewal]

Dear instructor:

I cannot understand why D is wrong.
IMO, Aspirin work as well as XXX at the prevention of zzz. this sentence is unambiguous in meaning.
I find a official example using this pattern
x are more efficient than y at acquiring carbon.
So, why Aspirin work as well as XXX at the prevention of zzz is wrong?

Could you please help me
Your Yama

as the poster above was trying to explain, "work at xxxxx" is not an idiomatic expression here.

even if you don't know this, though, you should still be able to pick (a) over (d), because (a) is more direct and efficient in its language.
i.e., even if (d) were idiomatic (it isn't), it would still be inferior to (a):
works ... at the prevention of X
vs.
prevents X
there's no question which of these has greater economy of expression.

note that "wordiness" vs. "concision" will never be the ONLY factor deciding a problem - here, there's the idiom issue as well - but it's a relatively easy difference to judge, and can help immensely in eliminating choices between which you're otherwise having trouble choosing.

[garryrother]

Hi Experts,

Whether the following be ok or it would indicate 2 different drugs?

According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, aspirin prevents blood clots just as well as does the most commonly used and the most expensive blood-thinning drug.

Thanks,
Garry

[thanghnvn]

if the tense the the second clause is different, we have to repeat the full verb phrase. This is the rule of ellipsis. this is why C is wrong.

we need "will prevent" in C to make it correct

is my thinking correct?

[RonPurewal]

Hi Experts,

Whether the following be ok or it would indicate 2 different drugs?

According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, aspirin prevents blood clots just as well as does the most commonly used and the most expensive blood-thinning drug.

Thanks,
Garry

well, you'd use that to indicate 2 different drugs ... but that still wouldn't work as written, because "drug" would have to become "drugs" (plural).

much more importantly, the gmat exam will never test this sort of thing, so there's little sense in worrying about it.