Minimum Wage Effects

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Skeptics view the increase in minimum wage not as a measure that will promote the economic well-being of lower-income citizens, as it is intended to be, rather as a step that will increase unemployment and have the opposite of its intended effect.

Review: Minimum Wage Effects


Explanation

Creating a filter: We read the prompt. Something appears to be missing: our trained ears want to hear not only "rather," but rather "but rather." When the word "rather" is preceded in a sentence by "not," the phrase should be "but rather," and "not [only]...but rather..." is a two-part construction requiring parallelism. We can hear this more easily by omitting the dependent clause that starts with "that will promote...," since dependent clauses can be omitted from a sentence without impacting the grammatical of the main, independent clause. "Skeptics view the increase not as a measure that will blah blah, but rather as a step blah blah." That sounds better. We look for "but rather" in the answer choices.

Applying the filter: We don't find "but rather," but answer choice (D) solves the problem by introducing the key missing word "but," to communicate the contrast that the imaginary author of this sentence intends to convey.

Choices (C) and (E) have the word "but" but in nonsensical phrases. In choice (B), also, the word "yet" is not a proper word to convey the intended function of "but," which is to establish the proper way that the minimum wage should be viewed according to the sentence. The correct answer is (D).

Many sentence correction questions rely on knowledge of idiom; in other words, no amount of logic will help you solve them if you aren't familiar with the phrases involved. Complicating the matter is the fact that the test makers don't publish or cite any kind of list of idioms that you must know for the test. Given that, the best way to strengthen your knowledge of idioms is to go through realistic practice questions and take note of the idioms as you go. All of the practice questions in this free course are modeled after official questions released by the test maker and hence provide as good a basis of the idiomatic English knowledge you'll need for the GMAT. Again, the correct answer is (D).


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