Verbal Section-about 'and'

This is the second of a short series of articles on the short list of what are known as coordinating conjunctions, short words themselves that show up very frequently in the GMAT Sentence Correction questions. Learning them can save you time, allowing you to eliminate wrong answer choices quickly and confidently; understanding them will of course also help add style and clarity to your AWA and admissions applications. These coordinating conjunctions are often remembered by the acronym FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So); their job in a sentence is joining two or more parallel . . . well, things in a sentence.

1. These words can join single words (Would you like sausage or mushrooms on your pizza?); 2. whole phrases (He plans to sit around in his underwear today and put off doing laundry until the end of the week); 3. or entire independent clauses -- things that would stand alone as complete sentences without the conjunction (I would love to try the peaches, but the fuzz gives me the chills). The things these conjunctions connect must be the same type of thing -- an adverb and another adverb, a noun and a noun, an independent clause with another independent clause. Just as you can only add fractions when they have the same denominator, you can only use parallel parts with coordinating conjunctions. All of these coordinating conjunctions also have at least one other job in English.

II. AND And is the second of our FANBOYS; it is the most common of them all. You are likely familiar enough with it from everyday use, but and does have a few uses you might not have considered;and also provides one major source of Sentence Correction errors for the GMAT. And is the "+" of the verbal world at its most basic level, but can also be used (sometimes in place of other words) to show unexpected opposition, result, comparison, contrast, consequence, and order of events in time. •

Unexpected opposition (the word yet is used more commonly): He drank, smoked, and ate red meat

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every day for 77 years, and he died in an accident at the age of 98. Result: She failed the test and was not admitted into the journalism program. Comparison (the word but is used more commonly): In the same concentration, sugar is sweet and

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sucrose is 600 times sweeter. Contrast (the word but is used more commonly): For most people, being kissed on the lips feels good and

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being punched in the face feels bad. Consequence: Ignore my advice and you'll be sorry! Order of events: The bus driver saw the tornado and turned down a country road to avoid it. That said, there are two principal rules of and that should concern you on Test Day:

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Rule 1: Things joined by and need to be parallel. Rule 2: And is the only word that can make a plural subject out of singular nouns. The first rule should be familiar to you from the many, many places where the GMAT and the English language require parallelism, so we will focus on the second one. As you will have seen if you have done any GMAT Verbal practice at all, the makers of the test love to put modifying phrases between the subject

and the verb. It is important to remember the subject of the sentence, no matter how many other people, places, and things get added in by means of these other phrases. My dog has fleas. My dog, Kitty, has fleas. My dog, a large German Shepherd named Kitty, has fleas. My dog, a large German Shepherd that I named Kitty in honor of a comic book character from some of my favorite stories and movies, has fleas. Note that dog is the singular subject, and despite all the intervening words, it has a singular verb. The GMAT will frequently separate the subject from the verb, place non-subject words of a different number closer to the verb (as I did with movies right before has above), or both. However: My dog and my cat have fleas. (the word and makes the subject plural, since two creatures have fleas) My dog, along with all other dogs in my neighborhood, has fleas. (even though many dogs have fleas in this sentence, the other dogs are not part of the subject, and therefore have no impact on the singular verb)