Friday, May 12, 2006

Misplaced Restricters

GMAT Verbal Section -- Misplaced Restricters


Restricters are one word modifiers , they limit the meaning of other words or phrases.Restricters include almost, exactly, even, just, nearly, hardly, merely and scarcely.

Restricter is placed directly before the word or phrase it modifies.

Example of misplaced restricter

My roommate only smiles on weekends.

Literally the sentence suggests that on weekends the roomate does nothing except smiling - he/she does not eats,talks etc.
Since this unlikely the restricter should be placed before its actual headword.There are 3 ways to edit the above example .

Edited 1 - My roommate smiles only on weekends. => He/ She does notsmile on Monday through Friday.

Edited 2 - My only roommate smiles on weekends. => The writer has one roommate, period.

Edited 3 - Only my roommate smiles on weekends. => All the other people the writer knows or sees never smile on weekends.

2 comments:

Prachi Pareekh said...

Indians score less in verbal.Sentence correction is most scoring yet most difficult section but by solving more number of questions, you will definitely improve. It helps you to get the idea about the type of errors you will have to look for in the questions. e.g when one event precedes the other, use of past perfect sentence must be there. This is a very common error in Gmat questions.All the very best to you.

pahwa said...

Hi Prachi,
This is an amazing blog. It has all that one needs to know about GMAT grammer.
I have started my prep from SC, and the very first doc that I am doing is 1000SC link available on scoretop. Before starting, I went through this link and went through grammer.
I am at present on Q551, and so far my accuracy rate is 7/10, tending towards 8/10. How can I improve further. Please suggest.
You can mail me on gmatian.suneet@gmail.com or pahwa.suneet@gmail.com

Thank you,
regards
Suneet Pahwa