hello this is Chris with Magoosh and today we have
an installment of gmat sentence correction
tips tricks and strategies and today's trick
today's thing to look out for is what i like to call hidden parallelism
now i'm assuming you already know what parallelism is the point of this video
isn't to go over parallelism but it's to go about how the
test uses concepts like parallelism and makes it really tricky and hard for
us to figure stuff out in this case i like to call this
instance hidden parallelism what exactly do i
mean by that well let's dive into a question here and
have a look so here we'll notice this long complex
question when i say complex it has multiple
moving parts and it's a compound complex sentence and a lot of
it is also underlined so a lot to wade through let
me start off by reading it for decades the state government has
been promising to construct a high-speed rail system between the state's two
major metropolitan areas and though some projects like the laying
down of small segments of track having been started years back several
setbacks in the budget and in the actual execution of this work
have stalled the project in definitely okay so as i said a lot going
on there what do we do we don't throw our hands up in the spare
even with something this long the gmat's gonna follow
its usual grab bag of tricks you're gonna have three two splits
in fact with this much of the part or of the sentence underlined you might
even have multiple three two splits so the first one that jumps out at us
isn't necessarily the one that's right at the beginning it's the
though with split no that's a little bit uh iffy that's not really a 3-2 split
but the thing that jumps out at me is that like when i see like
after that having seen hundreds upon hundreds of sentence correction
questions i think right away okay that's a like versus such as test and
when we have a specific example of something in this case
a specific project is just laying down the small segments of track
then we know we need such as and so just like that we can get rid of
answers a and answers d now
a little thing parenthetically here when you see something that kind of sounds
awkward potentially the laying down of small segments of track
don't get pulled into that again the gmat's going to rely on its
usual grab bag of tricks and we here again honed in on the such as versus
like split and that leaves us with b c and e now what do we
look at next as i said we're not going to focus on
the laying down of small segments of track we're going to look for something
else that's different between b d and e i notice war already started versus
having been started so this is a verb tense issue
and these can sometimes be a good way to approach the question
but aren't always this clear cut and sometimes force you to read the sentence
over and over again to kind of sound it out or figure out
where the noun is and where which noun that verb actually relates to so
what we're going to do here is we're going to keep on reading and we
get to where it says several setbacks in the budget
and several budgetary setbacks that is
answer choice b has several setbacks in the budget and c
and e both have several budgetary setbacks
so just like that i throw my hands up in the air and say hallelujah it's
concision versus wordiness and gmat loves
concision the shorter as long as it says the exact same thing the better and
seen e both have several budgetary setbacks which is shorter than several
setbacks of the budget however that's the trap because we forgot that
we always look at have to look at the underlying part even if it's super long
like this in the context of the sentence look at
the very end of the underlying part in the original sentence where it says
in the budget if we read on what's the next thing and
in the actual execution therefore the parallelism is
between in the budget and in the actual execution we can't change
in the budget to several budgetary setbacks because we
get rid of that in there and we change the structure of that phrase so it's no
longer parallel with in the actual execution
which is the part of the sentence that isn't underlined
that we have to make sure that the underlying part matches up with
and so just like that because we spotted this hidden parallelism that is
parallelism that happens outside of the underlying
part of the sentence because we were able to spot that we
don't even have to deal with either answer choice c or answer
choice e we've been able to eliminate them just
like that and get the correct answer b which is great because otherwise you
would be looking at the width versus the dough split you might be confused there
and spend a lot of time and you might not notice the having been
versus war because again there's a lot to wade through there
so hidden parallelism is yet another one of gmat tricks
it's typically not common at all in the lower medium level questions but you
will see it when you start getting up to those
harder questions that will help you get to the 700 plus level