GRAMMAR QUANDARY!!!!!

After quite a long hiatus I am back to mete out a few ways to deal with one of the most dubious sections of CAT grammar- MODIFIERS.

I call this area dubious because there are hardly any rules per se but then, here is where our reading habits come to the rescue. If we are well read, we generally tend to understand the nuances better for the simple fact being our comfort with the flow of a language(any language) always helps us to identify the slightest error in the construction.

So let's take some typical modifier questions (from OG for GMAT) and analyse them.

"The automotive conveyor belt system, which Henry Ford modeled after an assembly line technique introduced by Ransom Olds, reduced from a day and a half to 93 minutes the required time of assembling a Model T."

Now as we know a modifier is that part of the sentence that gives some extra information or adds to the meaning. We also know that it is preferred to keep the modifier and the modified together. Now in the above example, our modifying phrase, naturally is "from a day and a half to 93 minutes". Let's delve further into it. the word "reduced" is followed by "from a day...", which leads to the ambiguity about what is being reduced. Therefore to make the sentence unambiguous and crisp, it can be reframed as, "reduced the time required to assemble a Model T from one and a half day to 93 minutes."

Now let's take a look at another one

"As a result of medical advances, many people that might at one time have died as children of such infections as diphtheria,pneumonia or rheumatic fever now live well into old age."

Now in this case, following the pronoun rule we know "people" calls for "who" instead of "that". Secondly, "at one time" can be transformed into "once"(adjective). In the given statement, it seems that the people had died as children of diseases like diphtheria etc but that is not what the statement wants to convey . In case of compound verbs like, "may have", "could have" etc, it is advisable to insert the modifier between the verbs. Hence, the corrected sentence could be, "who might once have died in childhood of such" which shall remove ambiguity of any kind from the statement.

Do not panic if you find Modifiers to take some time as this area needs a lot of reading and practice. I will keep you posted on some more typical modifier based questions. Till then, keep reading newspapers like Wall street Journal or our very own HINDU or Economic Times to get used to the flow of the structure.