A Study of Children of Divorced Parents Found that Ten Years After the Parents' Divorce, Children Who had been Under Six Years of Age at the Time of the Settlement Were Not Preoccupied

Question: A study of children of divorced parents found that ten years after the parents' divorce, children who had been under six years of age at the time of the settlement were not preoccupied, nor very curious, about the reasons that led to their parents’ divorce.

1. Not preoccupied, nor very curious, about the reasons that led to their parents’ divorce.
2. Not preoccupied with, or even very curious about, the reasons for their parents’ divorce
3. Neither preoccupied, not even very curious, with the reasons that led to their parents’ divorce
4. Neither preoccupied with the reasons that led to their parents’ divorces or even very curious about them
5. Neither preoccupied with the reasons that their parents’ divorced not even very curious about it

“A study of children of divorced parents found that ten years after the parents' divorce”- is a GMAT sentence correction question. This particular GMAT sentence correction topic has been taken from the book ‘The Official Guide of GMAT Verbal Review, 2nd Edition, 2009’. This question checks Parallelism, Comparison of two elements and Modifiers. GMAT Sentence Correction questions comprise 11-16 questions to be completed within 65 minutes. Each Sentence Correction question contains a sentence with an underlined portion that includes 0-2 errors.

Answer: B

Explanation: The following concepts are used here:

1. Dictation
2. Parallelism

Option A: Incorrect
This option is incorrect because it uses the phrase “not preoccupied, nor even curious”, which is incorrect. It should have used “neither preoccupied nor even curious”. Also, the phrase “not preoccupied…..about their the reasons” does not make any sense. You can not be preoccupied about something, you can be preoccupied with something. So, Option A is incorrect.

Option B: Correct
This option is correct because we don’t have the construction “neither/nor” in this option and “or” works just fine to make sense. Also, the idioms used in this option “preoccupied with…..the reasons” and “curious about the reasons” are correct and not illogical. So, Option B is correct.

Option C: Incorrect
This option is incorrect because the commas used after “preoccupied” and “curious” are there to indicate extra information but when we remove these commas “children were neither preoccupied with the reasons that led to their parents' divorce”, the sentence does not make any sense. So, Option C is incorrect.

Option D: Incorrect
This option is incorrect because we can use “neither/nor” but not “neither/or”. Also, the term “parents’ divorces” sounds like the parents have multiple divorces. The statement discusses a single divorce or multiple divorces, so this option is grammatically incorrect. Option D is incorrect.

Option E: Incorrect
This option is incorrect because this choice incorrectly uses the singular pronoun “it” to refer to the plural “reasons”. Since there is a pronoun error in this option, we can not claim it as the right option for the sentence. So, Option E is incorrect.

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