More and more in recent years, cities

More and more in recent years, cities are stressing the arts as a means to greater economic development and investing millions of dollars in cultural activities, despite strained municipal budgets and fading federal support.

2 Explanations

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Felix Manan

How come invest (simple present) MUST be in the present progressive in order to be parallel? I perused through some of Magoosh's blog over tense parallelism and per the blogs it seems that one can have different tenses parallel, although I did not see an example with this specific combination of simple present and present progressive.

https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-verbs-progressive-tense/

https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-grammar-rules-parallelism-and-verb-tenses/

Nov 15, 2017 • Comment

Adam

Hi Felix,

I would say that although there may be certain answers that do not always obey strict verb parallelism, if you're choosing between two choices that are otherwise identical, we should prefer the parallel one.

In this case, we can eliminate (B) and (D) for the use of "economically" and (E) for the use of "and the investment of." Now we're comparing (A) and (C):

(A) to greater economic development and investing
(C) of greater economic development and invest

either "means to" or "means of" is acceptable, so our only decision now is parallelism. (A) is clearly more parallel than (C), so it must be better.

Nov 21, 2017 • Reply

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Mike McGarry, Magoosh Tutor

May 22, 2013 • Comment

JAY SETHI

For this question can't we use the concept of diction. Thus can't B be the correct ans? Because economic means the study of economics and economically means cost effective.

Jan 18, 2016 • Reply

Adam

Hi Jay,

Yes, this is what Mike is getting at when he speaks near the end of the video about how "economically" wants to emphasize the action, rather than the noun "development."

So, yes, (B) changes the meaning and in fact is unclear.

Jan 18, 2016 • Reply