It Ought to be Her with Whom you Share your Secrets, Not Me.

Question: It ought to be her with whom you share your secrets, not me.

1. her with whom you share your secrets, not me
2. her with whom you share your secrets, not I.
3. she with whom you share your secrets, not me.
4. she with whom you share your secrets, not I.
5. her with who you share your secrets, not me.

“It ought to be her with whom you share your secrets, not me.” – is a GMAT Critical question. This particular GMAT Critical Reasoning topic has been taken from the book “Kaplan’s GMAT Prep Plus , 2021’. In this particular topic, candidates need to choose the option that best suits the passage and the position stated in the passage. GMAT sentence correction tests the logical and analytical skills of the candidates. The GMAT Critical Reasoning section contains 10 -13 GMAT critical reasoning questions out of 36 GMAT verbal questions.

Answer: A
Explanation:

The topic we are given is : It ought to be her with whom you share your secrets, not me. These types of questions contain grammatical errors in the underlined sentence and we have to choose the correct statement from the options.

This particular question checks a famous construction "It is__that," but the word "that" is replaced with a less common word "whom."

1. It is X that do something: here X is the the subject
2. It is Y that Z do something to/on/with: here Y is the object of the verb/action of Z

For Example:

1. It is the board of directors(X) that make the final decision, not the CEO.
2. It is they (board of members) that make the final decision, not he (CEO).
3. It was Alex(X) that I contacted yesterday, not Alice.
4. It was him that I contacted yesterday, not her.

Considering the given pattern, let us check each options to find the correct answer.

1. her with whom you share your secrets, not me - Here, "her/ she" and "whom/ who" refers to the same person in the same case. So, we can consider this option as the correct answer.
2. her with whom you share your secrets, not I. - B is incorrect as it lacks parallelism - "her" is followed by "I" which is not the same case as "her ("me" is the same case as "her").
3. she with whom you share your secrets, not me. - Here, both should be subject pronouns or object pronouns. We can eliminate C based on this theory ("she"- subject pronoun, "whom"- object pronoun).
4. she with whom you share your secrets, not I. - This is also same as C and hence, can be eliminated.
5. her with who you share your secrets, not me. - This statement has "her"- object pronoun and "who"- subject pronoun. However, since both should be same, we can discard this option as well.

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