The GMAT occasionally allows unnecessary helping words?

[yo4561]

Hello my MP friends,

I came across this in the All the Verbal book: The GMAT occasionally allows unnecessary helping words. With the following examples:
"(1). Apples are more healthy to eat than caramels.
(2). Apples are more healthy to eat than caramels ARE"

I realize that you are not supposed to use your ear on verbal, but this sounds wrong to me. I want to say healthier instead of more healthy.

I understand that you are not supposed to take an adverb that ends in “-ly” and make it a comparison by changing the ending to “-er” expect for words such as "faster" because you cannot say "more fastly". Instead, MP says that you add “more".

...So when would you use "healthier" then?

[esledge]

Hello my MP friends,

I came across this in the All the Verbal book: The GMAT occasionally allows unnecessary helping words. With the following examples:
"(1). Apples are more healthy to eat than caramels.
(2). Apples are more healthy to eat than caramels ARE"

I realize that you are not supposed to use your ear on verbal, but this sounds wrong to me. I want to say healthier instead of more healthy.

I understand that you are not supposed to take an adverb that ends in “-ly” and make it a comparison by changing the ending to “-er” expect for words such as "faster" because you cannot say "more fastly". Instead, MP says that you add “more".

...So when would you use "healthier" then?

Hi yo, I ran across something like this when I was editing recently. I can't remember the exact word, but something like "rarer" just hit my ear wrong, and I had to look it up: it is, in fact, a real word that means "more rare," so both can be used. I think "healthier" could work in the examples above. That's not to say that we wouldn't have a preference between the two, but I think this is more like an idiom issue than something governed by rules.

In your example, I suspect that "more healthy" might have been used for two reasons: (1) common convention and (2) the "to eat." This example does compare nouns (apples and caramels), but on the basis of how they are "to eat." I think "healthier" would sound better if you were only dealing with nouns directly, but I have no good explanation for why my ear is telling me that. In the example I made up with just nouns and no infinitive, both comparative forms work, I think:

Active dogs are generally healthier than inactive dogs.
Active dogs are generally more healthy than inactive dogs.

Like you, I prefer the "healthier" version. Will the GMAT make you choose between two choices with only this difference? No, never! I have seen a few adjective vs. adverb splits, but that's governed by whether you are describing/comparing nouns or verbs/other. If you do see a healthier vs. more healthy split, there's likely somethings else going on: bad parallelism in one of them, or something else entirely elsewhere in the sentence.