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Question

Difficulty: MediumEliminating Wordiness

A portion of the passage below is underlined.

In 1956, Malcom McLean, a former trucking magnate, revolutionized global trade by introducing the modern shipping container. Before this innovation, cargo was loaded piece by piece, a process that was incredibly slow and expensive. McLean’s standardized steel boxes could be easily transferred from trucks to trains to ships, which was an efficient method that served to drastically reduce both loading times and shipping costs by a significant margin. Today, millions of these containers traverse the globe, forming the backbone of international commerce.

Which choice most effectively and concisely expresses the underlined idea?

  1. A
    NO CHANGE
  2. ships, drastically reducing both loading times and shipping costs.Answer
  3. C
    ships. Which drastically reduced both loading times and shipping costs.
  4. D
    ships, this drastically reduced both loading times and shipping costs.

Answer

ships, drastically reducing both loading times and shipping costs.
The correct option is the most concise and direct phrasing that maintains grammatical correctness. It uses a participle clause to cleanly show the result of the standardized boxes being easily transferred, avoiding redundant words like 'efficient method' or 'significant margin'.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify redundancy and wordiness in the original sentence.
The phrase 'which was an efficient method that served to... by a significant margin' is highly repetitive and adds unnecessary length.
ACT English questions require the most concise and direct phrasing that is grammatically correct.
2
Evaluate the answer choices for conciseness and grammatical structure.
The option containing the participle 'drastically reducing' expresses the exact same idea in a fraction of the words and fits smoothly into the sentence structure without creating punctuation errors.
Eliminating wordiness while keeping the sentence grammatically sound is the primary goal of this question type.

Key Concept

Eliminating Wordiness
Estimated Time:1m 0s
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Topics

Eliminating Wordiness

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