I'm Erika from PrepScholar GMAT, back with my number one trick for difficult Sentence Correction questions to help you catch hidden errors in
sentence structure, agreement, tense, parallelism, idioms, and even more.
Sentence Correction sentences are often very convoluted.
Many are multiple lines long, loaded with punctuation, and totally incomprehensible at first glance.
This is intentional.
Test makers hide sentence errors by throwing in a bunch of extra words that mask those errors and confuse test takers.
So how can we simplify these sentences to bring these hidden errors into the light?
The trick I recommend to students most frequently is to totally take out any extra, descriptive information from the sentence. I
usually do this in two steps. I'll explain each using a real 700 level GMAT problem.
Step one is to get rid of pieces of the sentence that are set off by commas. A
hard and fast rule to know for the GMAT:
anything that is set off from the body of a sentence with commas is going to be extra, descriptive information.
This means it's not 100% vital to the meaning of the sentence. If
something isn't necessary to the meaning of the sentence, it also shouldn't be necessary to the grammar of the sentence.
This means you should be able to remove it and be left with a complete and totally functional sentence.
Extra, descriptive information can come at the beginning or the end of the sentence, where it will be set off with a single comma.
It can also come in the middle of a sentence, where it will be set off with a pair of commas — one on either side.
Let's take a look at our example GMAT problem.
This sentence is a real doozy, but we're gonna take it one step at a time.
We'll start by ignoring our answer choices and looking at our original sentence.
We see that "rivaling" through "achievement" is set off at the very beginning of our sentence with a single comma.
If we read it, we see that it describes how great of an achievement the army of terra-cotta warriors are.
So this is definitely descriptive and definitely not necessary to the sentence. Let's go ahead and cut that out.
We also see that China's first emperor is set off in the middle of the sentence with a pair of commas.
Looking at it in context, we see that it describes who Qin Shi Huang is: he's China's first emperor.
Again, descriptive and not necessary — cut it out.
We're totally out of commas now, and already our sentence is much simpler. Let's move on to step two.
Step two is to get rid of adjective and adverb phrases. In other words,
lose all of the extra descriptive information that isn't set off by commas.
This is a trickier step because we don't get any commas as helpful clues.
We need to pay more attention to the actual meaning of the sentence.
Let's go back to our problem.
We'll start by looking at our subject.
What noun is our sentence about?
It's about the "army of terra-cotta warriors created to protect Qin Shi Huang in his afterlife".
That is way too long. So what can we lose?
Okay, "of
"terra-cotta warriors" describes "army", so that's all extra information.
Then, "created to protect Qin Shi Huang"
also describes "army", and then "in his afterlife" describes "protect", so all of that's extra information as well.
We actually see that every part of the subject except "army" is extra information.
So let's go ahead and cut all of that out.
Much better! Now we have what's known in the grammar world as a
"simple subject".
Here that simple subject is "army". We also have a much less confusing sentence.
So we'll think about our sentence like this as we go through our answer choices.
Now that we simplified our sentence down, we can look at our answer choices to see if there are any errors that are now
easier to see. We'll start with answer choice A.
Now that all of that extra descriptive junk is out of the way,
we should see that "them" at the the sentence is a major problem.
Number one: it's plural, which doesn't fit with our singular subject "army".
Number two: it repeats our subject for a second time.
"The army took more than 36 years to complete them">
No way, we should lose them, so we only have one subject.
Looking at our answer options, we see that a B and E
all include a second subject. In B, at least the second subject is singular, but without the agreement error
it's still an error in sentence structure. So we can rule out all three of those answer choices.
So now we're down to two
answer choices. If we had to guess at this point, our chances of getting the correct answer are much higher.
But let's look more closely at C and D to see if any other errors jump out.
Now that this sentence is so much simpler,
it's easier to notice our "and". "And"
is a classic indicator that we're dealing with parallel structure between the stuff before the "and" and the stuff after the "and".
Looking at C, we see that before the "and", we have "the army is
more than 2,000 years old".
Then, after the "and", we have "the army took
700,000 artisans more than 36 years to complete".
Both start with a verb, making them parallel — this works!
But down here in D, we see before the "and", the army is
more than two thousand years old. But after the "and", "the army 700,000 artisans
took more than 36 years to complete".
This isn't parallel, and it really doesn't make sense. So we can rule out D and pick C as our answer.
Let's look quickly back at the original sentence. These errors in agreement, sentence structure, and parallelism are
much more difficult to identify with all of this extra descriptive information, surrounding them and breaking them up.
However, by cutting out everything set off by commas and all adjective and adverb phrases
we were quickly to bring these errors out into the open and definitively pick a correct answer. And
that's my number one trick for difficult Sentence Correction problems: simplify the sentence by taking out extra descriptive information.
If you have any questions on what we talked about today, please leave a comment below, and I'll be happy to respond.
Also, please comment on what you'd like us to make future videos about. Do you want more Sentence Correction tips?
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Thanks for watching, and happy GMAT studies!