First, a few practice GMAT Sentence Correction questions for warm-up. 1) Had the United States allowed the California Republic to remain independent after the Bear Flag Revolt rather than annexing it with military force, this “California nation” might have become the wealthiest nation in North America. Had the United States allowed the California Republic to [...]
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GMAT Idioms: Of Thinking and Knowing
First, a couple of Sentence Correction practice questions. 1) Organizers claimed that the rally for public health care drew close to half a million people, but the city officials estimated the amount of people at the rally to be less than 300,000. the amount of people at the rally to be less the number of [...]
GMAT Idioms: Of Hope and Fear
These two verbs, to hope and to fear, are similar, not only in their focus on expectations for the future, but also in the large diversity of idioms they can take. In this post, I hope to exhaust the idioms for these two verbs. First of all, to hope, by itself, is an intransitive verb: [...]
GMAT Idioms: Whether
The astute reader will recognize the self-referential error in the above sentence. The first thing any prospective GMAT test taker needs to learn about this is the If vs. Whether split, so common on GMAT Sentence Correction. Beyond this, there are characteristic idioms involving the word “whether”: asks whether question whether wonder whether depends on [...]
GMAT Idioms: Correlative Conjunctions
Conjunctions Conjunctions are joining words: they help to link together two nouns, or two verbs, or two larger structures in a sentence. Coordinating conjunctions (e.g. “and”, “but”, “or”) simply link two words or parts — they can even link two independent clauses. Subordinate conjunctions (“because”, “that”, “who”, etc.) introduce a subordinate clause, a dependent clause. [...]
GMAT Idioms: Verbs and “that” Clauses
Sophisticated writing often involves statements of what different people think, say, argue, or believe. Not surprisingly, sentences about this litter the GMAT Verbal section. In fact, such sentences are also quite common in everyday life. Just as frequent paths over a lawn kill the grass, so frequent use of any grammatical structure in ordinary speech [...]
GMAT Idioms: Cause and Consequence
The triumph of Science over the past five centuries has been its ability to delineate what causes what. While nothing in Economics is not quite as precise as, say, Chemistry, the ability to identify causes and effects is still valuable — indeed, the economist who can clearly demonstrate that any large scale economic process is [...]
GMAT Idioms of Whole and Part
Many things have wholes made of parts, parts grouped together into wholes. Atoms and molecules are the parts of material substance. The whole of the United States is, as the name suggests, made of fifty parts, the states. On any large company’s balance sheet, the whole of the revenue or the cost or the profit [...]
GMAT Idioms of Comparison
Business is all about comparisons — which brand or option or product is cheaper? faster? more reliable? safer? a better investment? etc. etc. Because of this, the GMAT loves comparisons, and loves to explore then in Sentence Correction. The idioms used in comparisons are endless varied and subject to numerous colloquial errors, so this is [...]
GMAT Idioms Involving “As”
The word “as” is a remarkable little power-packed word. It functions as both a preposition (as in this sentence!) and as a conjunction. It is one of the flexible and multifaceted words in the English language. Not surprisingly, the word “as” appears in a wide assortment of idioms. This blog article covers the “as”-idioms most [...]
