In Recent Years a Controversy Has Developed Around the Lucrative GMAT Sentence Correction

Question: In recent years a controversy has developed around the lucrative textbook publishing market as students question if textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder over their accuracy.

1. as students question if textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder over their accuracy
2. as students question the expense and professors wonder about the accuracy of textbooks
3. where students question whether textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder whether they are accurate
4. where students are questioning if textbooks should be as expensive as they are while professors wonder if they are accurate
5. as students are questioning whether textbooks must be as expensive as they are and professors wonder about their accuracy

Correct Answer: B
Explanation: The question is interesting with idiomatic usage and a bit of parallelism thrown in. The following arguments could be used to defend the suggested language change:

• Parallelism
• Considering two separate truths
• Modifiers

as students question the expense and professors wonder about the accuracy of textbooks- Correct. This option choice corrects all the errors mentioned above. It clearly identifies that both are questioning something about the textbooks and the structure is also proper. "students question the expense ...and professors wonder about the accuracy". Based on concision and more importantly on parallelism, this is the right choice.

Lets see the other available options.

Option A
as students question if textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder over their accuracy- Incorrect. One is the use of the word ‘if’. This word is used only if a condition is being expressed. In this sentence, there is no such condition. The other error in Option A is the use of ‘over’ after the verb ‘wonder’. The correct idiomatic usage is ‘wonder about’. No need of if. Use if only in conditional sentences else use whether. 'Their' is very confusing here.

Option C
where students question whether textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder whether they are accurate- Incorrect. Can be eliminated as it starts with the relative adverb ‘where’. The adverb is used to convey a sense of place. In this sentence, the underlined portion is a clause that tells us what the ‘controversy’ is. If the clause had to give a description of something that happened in the market, we could have used the adverb ‘where’. Meaning says that students only ask questions in the market and nowhere else. 'They' is confusing here.

Option D
where students are questioning if textbooks should be as expensive as they are while professors wonder if they are accurate- Incorrect. Eliminated for the same reason as choice C. The adverb is used to convey a sense of place. In this sentence, the underlined portion is a clause that tells us what the ‘controversy’ is. If the clause had to give a description of something that happened in the market, we could have used the adverb ‘where’. Meaning says that students only ask questions in the market and nowhere else. 'They' is confusing here.

Option E
as students are questioning whether textbooks must be as expensive as they are and professors wonder about their accuracy- Incorrect. This option has the unnecessary use of the present continuous tense – ‘are questioning’. The sentence expresses a general idea and the simple present tense is used to convey general or universal ideas. The continuous tense should not be used in such sentences. Further, Option E contains the verb ‘must’, which is too strong in this context. Use of simple present tense is better than using present continuous tense. Again 'their' is confusing here

“In recent years a controversy has developed around the lucrative”- is a GMAT sentence correction question. These sorts of questions come up with grammatical errors in the underlined part of the sentence. The candidates need to select the correct statement given in the options. The GMAT sentence correction section demands good skills in grammar since the candidate has to identify common grammatical errors. GMAT sentence correction is a part of GMAT verbal.

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