Erika here with PrepScholar GMAT back today with another top GMAT sentence
correction trick as always if you like this video please hit the button to
subscribe and feel free to check out our online program and tutoring options on
the PrepScholar website or head over to our blog for even more great GMAT
content links are in the description now as we discussed in our other sentence
correction trick video errors and sentence correction questions are often
really hard to identify getting rid of extra information like we recommend in
our other trick can often work wonders for finding these errors however it
doesn't always work sometimes the error is in the extra information that we
remove and sometimes we just don't have time to plug in and reword each answer
choice this is why it's good to have a second trick on hand when you can't find
the error use the answer choices now in every problem there will be differences
between the correct answer and the rest of the choices that make the correct
answer right and the wrong answer is wrong by simply identifying these
differences between our answer choices we can locate potential errors let's try
this out with a real GMAT problem if we read through the original sentence it
may not be immediately clear what the question is testing is the original
sentence even wrong so we'll look to the answer choices for clues the first
difference we notice in this sentence is probably going to be saw vs. seen it's
the first word of the answer choices it's dealing with tense which is often a
pretty straightforward error and there are only two options in all five of the
answer choices saw which is a past tense verb and seen which is a past participle
so we use it with have has or had to create a perfect tense so which do we
want past or perfect looking back in the sentence we see that the subject of the
sentence visitors have looked up into the canopy
that's present perfect these same visitors then proceed to see the monkeys
so our visitors are doing two actions at the same time looking and seeing this
means we want these two verbs to be parallel so we want visitors have looked
and seen so while the issue with saw may not have been immediately obvious
noticing the difference between saw and seen gives us a hint as to what
might be going on in this sentence so we'll go ahead and rule out a b and c
next we'll look at the difference we notice next whose vs. with these words
come after a comma and describe the information preceding them so I'm gonna
guess we have a modifier issue here now we know that some modifiers like those
beginning with which and whose are picky they only ever refer to the noun closest
to them in this sentence that noun is branches alright so in E the branches
have arms and legs that hang like socks on a clothesline that's not right we
want this modifier to refer to monkeys so we can eliminate e and pick D as our
correct answer now note if we'd gone with this error first we could have
eliminated a and B for using whose as well also note there was another big
difference in this sentence hang versus were hanging versus hanging versus have
hung now we could have used these differences to eliminate but because
there are four different options here it isn't as easy to first figure out what's
being tested or two to eliminate answers quickly we have to evaluate each of the
four options so knowing that this would be a more difficult difference to work
with we're best off saving it for last turns out we didn't even need to use it
a quick caution oftentimes test makers will put trap differences or differences
that don't matter into sentence correction questions to catch test
takers who are using this strategy so like we did on our example problem if
you notice a difference that seems overly complicated or that you don't
know what to do with look for one that you do some good and relatively easy
errors to target are switches between singular and plural which indicate an
agreement error changes in verb tense which pretty obviously indicate a tense
error changes from verb to noun to adjective which can often indicate a
parallelism error and big sentence rearrangements which frequently indicate
a modifier error if you have any questions on what we talked about today or
suggestions for future videos please leave a comment below thanks for
watching and happy gmat studies