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mariezhu

enjoy！

－－－－－

comparisons with as and than

“Did you know that more people are killed each year by hogs in Indiana than by sharks?” says a writer in Scuba Magazine. You may well be wondering how many sharks there are in Indiana. In comparisons using as and than it is the second element that can give you trouble. It is easy to set up a faulty parallel, especially when prepositional phrases are involved. Consider this sentence: I want the photos in our brochure to look as impressive as their brochure.

Here the writer wants to compare photos in two different brochures, but the syntax compares the photos of one brochure with the entire brochure of the other organization. To be truly parallel, the sentence must read: I want the photos in our brochure to look as impressive as those in their brochure.

Note the addition of the pronoun those to counterbalance photos in the previous section of the sentence, and the repetition of the preposition in. You could, of course, repeat the noun photos instead of using a pronoun. Here is a similar example: They felt that the condition of the new buildings was not much better than the old ones.

In this sentence the condition of the new buildings is compared with the old buildings themselves, not with their condition. To make the sentence parallel, you must add the pronoun that to balance the noun condition. Again, you can repeat the noun if this is more to your liking, but in either case the prepositional phrase with of must follow: They felt that the condition of the new buildings was not much better than that (or the condition) of the old ones.

Sometimes it’s only the second preposition that gets left out in these comparative constructions, as in More cars are built in Canada than Mexico, where perfect parallelism requires … than in Mexico

As and than comparisons pose additional problems when the noun following as or than is the subject or object of an implied clause. Does the sentence The employees are more suspicious of the arbitrator than the owner mean that the employees distrust the arbitrator more than they distrust the owner or that the employees distrust the arbitrator more than the owner does? To be clear you must add a verb to the second element of the comparison: The employees are more suspicious of the arbitrator than they are of the owner or The employees are more suspicious of the arbitrator than the owner is.

Of course, sentences containing as and than comparisons may be unambiguous but still be in need of balancing. Here are two other examples: More than twice as many tons of corrugated cardboard are recycled each year than (are tons of) newspaper. The factory is producing as many transmissions as (it did) last year.

The material in parentheses is often left out in sentences of this type, but parallelism requires it.

Making a syntactically imperfect comparison may not be the most grievous fault you can commit in writing, and nearly everyone makes these faults when speaking. But when you have the choice, why not be precise?

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-4-27 20:26:07编辑过]

lwei1016

强

JerryGuan

enjoying, thanks.

The more, the better.

dashasha

HAHA<给MARIE送了束花。