hi welcome to egmat thank you for stopping by to solve this official sc question my name is
stacy trapanier i'm one of the subject matter experts here on the egmet team and i'm going
to work through this question from the og advanced guide on some historians with you
now this is a great question because we have a few different things that pop up while we
solve this question and work through our answer choices that test a few different skills so let's
get started with our three-step process with step one that meaning analysis we're going to go ahead
and utilize the sentence structure to really figure out what's going on with the sentence and
what the author's intended communication is so as we begin reading we see some historians of science
have argued so i know that i have these historians and these are historians of
science and these historians have argued something so i keep reading to find out what the argument
is that science moves forward okay so i know that this argument or what these historians have argued
is that science moves forward okay not so much because of the insights of great thinkers
but because of more mundane developments so i have a couple of reasons being compared
as to why science has moved forward so this first reason we'll call this reason a
is because of the insights of great thinkers and the science historians here saying that
this reason is not so much a reason as because of more mundane development so this will be reason b
such as improved tools and technologies so this last portion of the sentence is giving me
examples of these mundane developments these mundane developments or developments such as
improved tools and technologies okay so my meaning seems to be pretty straightforward
here nothing too confusing that is making me have to stop and really think and infer what's going
on so let's pull those key aspects make sure we have everything organized and we understand that
comparison that we were marking up so the first thing i know aspect one is that a few historians
have made an argument so this is that first piece right up here and then that second aspect is the
argument compares two factors responsible for the progress of science over time and this is those
two pieces being compared right here so we're gonna call this aspect two and then i know that
that insight of great thinkers is that first piece being compared so that's what we labeled as a
so i'm going to just mark that as a right next to that number one and the second piece which was b
were those mundane developments all right those are making logical sense as those two reasons
for progress that are being compared and then my third piece is to really understand that contrast
and that contrast or comparison really is that historians contend that number two or reason b
here is responsible for progress more than reason one so these mundane developments
are more important for the progress of science over time per the arguments of these historians
than the insights of great thinkers all right meaning pretty straightforward aspects
clear everything's organized so let's move on to step two which is that error analysis
now the original sentence is really attractive to a lot of students and a lot of people settle with
this as their answer choice because the comparison is logical we have these two reasons being
presented and everything checks out meaning wise and is laid out pretty logically the sentence
reads smoothly we don't have any big subject verb issues jumping out at us or big modifiers that
are a mess so nothing is really jumping out is a huge problem and we definitely see that the two
reasons of science has progressed are logical in this sentence but is the expression used
to communicate this comparison correct and to really analyze the expression used we have to
kind of backtrack in the sentence and go to that non-underlined portion as well and see that this
comparison really starts with not so much so we have to look at this non-underlying portion here
and our comparison begins with not so much because of the insights of great thinkers
but because of more mundane developments so the idiom being used here is not so much x but y
and we know that that expression is unidiomatic the proper expression
that we need for this structure and for this comparison is going to be not so much x as
y so we need to find a structure that corrects this unidiomatic expression
that uses as instead of but to properly communicate this logical comparison we have
going on so let's move into our answer choice analysis we know we're going to reject choice a
right off the top because of that unidiomatic expression to express this comparison let's
take a look at choice b now you'll notice here that choice b corrects the use of but and uses
as but now look at the entities that we have as parallel and you'll notice that because of is not
parallel to the results of so these two entities that are being connected are not parallel so we
can reject choice b for that parallelism issue now take a look at choice c choice c also properly
corrects that idiomatic error by using as instead of but and because of the insights is absolutely
parallel to as because of more mundane development so these two entities maintain that parallelism we
have the proper idiom our comparison is logical so choice c is going to indeed be our correct answer
choice but let's go ahead and rule out choices d and e just to make sure so choice d we can
quickly reject because we see the use of butt here which repeats our original error that we saw in
option a and also let's take a look at this change in structure we see at the beginning of this
option here we see through the insights of great thinkers now this change in structure is giving
us this meaning change here can science move forward through the insights of great thinkers
absolutely not we know that the argument is about the insights of great thinkers and that nothing
is moving through those insights of these great thinkers so we have this meaning change and we
have that idiomatic error that we had with the original sentence so choice d is out now let's
take a look at choice e and you'll notice a lot of red across the screen here because choice e is a
hot mess first and foremost it repeats that error with that idiom issue that we saw in choice a
then you also see the repeated parallelism issue that we saw in option b so we know through the
insights of is not parallel to results from and this option is also repeating that meaning
error we just discussed in option d through the insights of great thinkers this structure does not
communicate the meaning that we are looking for so for all of those issues we are going to reject
choice e and we can confidently accept choice c as our correct answer choice it absolutely gets
the job done everything is compared nicely it is idiomatically correct everything is parallel
it is a beautifully written sentence so if you take a waste for you always make sure you take
the time up front to understand what the sentence intends to communicate once you do that and you
realize you're dealing with comparison always make sure to check that the entities compared
are logically and grammatically aligned we even want those expressions and those idioms that
are communicating those comparisons to be balanced out and properly used and beware of answer choices
that slightly change the structure and thus create a logical meaning we saw that happening in choices
d and e here thank you so much for dropping by to solve this question with me please make
sure you drop a like below so we know you were here subscribe to our youtube channel for more
solutions and articles that we have coming your way also make sure you check the descriptions and
links below for more helpful resources and from all of us at eg matt happy learning