Question: Ana Brady's iconoclastic studies

GRE Verbal Problem Solving
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Hey all, in the above question Greg explains infact is a support for “contention breeds innovation”.

However, while I was attempting this question I had a problem with the 2nd blank:

  1. The sentence mentions “contrary to popular belief, contention breeds innovation” due to the comma in the sentence it seems like the popular belief is = “contention breeds innovation”
  2. Since we know the popular belief now “infact” in the sentence would act like a support to the previous idea and clear the misconception created by the popular belief
  3. This makes us come to infact “contention does not breed innovation”, because of which I chose discord instead of harmony

Please do let me know where did I go wrong here.
Thank you!!

2

The “contrary to popular belief” is an example of something called an embedded clause.

An embedded clause is extra information that does not change the logic of the sentence:

  1. The sentence would make sense by itself without the embedded clause
  2. The embedded clause would not make sense by itself

Embedded clauses usually appear between two commas or two dashes.

For example:

The coat, which was brown, was very expensive.

  1. Without the embedded clause, the sentence makes sense:

The coat was very expensive.

  1. The embedded clause does not make sense by itself:

which was brown

You can find more about this here: https://www.kestonprimary.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/English-Embedded-Clause-explanation.pdf

The sentence can be broken down like this:

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So here are the three ideas in this sentence:

  1. The studies illustrated that contention breeds innovation
  2. i)------- increased where there was an effort to lower ii)----------
  3. The results the study illustrated was “contrary to popular beliefs”

Since the “contrary to popular belief” is an embedded clause, we can eliminate it when breaking up the sentence, as it doesn’t affect the logic. So we just have 2 ideas (orange and green) that support each other.

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Thank you so much Ganesh :smile:

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