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According to a survey of graduating medical students conducted by the Association of American Medical Colleges, minority graduates are nearly four times more likely than are other graduates in planning to practice in socioeconomically deprived areas.

According to a survey of graduating medical students conducted by the Association of American Medical Colleges, minority graduates are nearly four times as likely as other graduates to plan on practicing in socioeconomically deprived areas.

Which sentence is better?

  1. Does the "conducted" modify "survey" or "Medical students"?
  2. What is the difference between "in planning to practice" and "to plan on practicing"?
  3. Shouldn't the second sentence be "minority graduates are nearly four times as likely as are other graduates to plan on practicing ..."?
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Mengxuan Fu
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  • likely takes the preposition to. As for the rest, writing advice and proof-reading may be off-topic on ELU. – Kris Apr 08 '14 at 05:26
  • You are asking three different questions in this one post. Please limit yourself to only one question per post so we can definitively answer one at a time. – MrHen Apr 22 '14 at 16:18

2 Answers2

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  1. The AAMC conducted the survey; it didn't conduct the students.

  2. My guess is that the writer of the sentence chose "in planning to practice" to avoid the repetition of "to" in "to plan to practice." If so, I think it was a poor decision. Technically, "likely in planning to practice" means either "likely [to do something not specified] in [that is, "in the course of"] planning to practice" or "likely during the planning phase to practice." Neither of these readings is what the writer means.

  3. See "X times as many as" or "X times more than" for previous coverage of this question on EL&U. For a more detailed (but not especially elegantly written) explanation of the numerical difference between "X times as much as" and "X times more than" see this post on everything2.com. In the GMAT test question you're asking about, if the actual ratio of minority to nonminority students who plan to practice in socioeconomically deprived areas is 4:1, then (by the reasoning given in the EL&U question and answer cited above) minority students are four times as likely as but three times more likely than nonminority students to have such plans; if the actual ratio is 5:1, then minority students are five times as likely as but four times more likely than nonminority students to have such plans. So you wouldn't want to replace "more likely than" with "as likely as," or vice versa, without changing the numerical ratio, too.

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Sven Yargs
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  1. The second sentence is better
  2. "conducted" modifies "survey"
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