I do believe that the inverted structure is the only such circumstance I’ve encountered in the official questions. Would you happen to be privy to any other correct examples?
Yes, the inverted structure is the only time I can recall seeing this unusual idiom used in official GMAT questions.
And are the prior 4 pages in this thread an example of the developing nature of the SC section and the GMAT exam, in general? I.e., since this construction appeared in an official answer, there is no doubt that the prior statements on page 1 (in which this type of sentence was called a Run-On) are incorrect?
I'm not able to find a prior post in this thread in which this specific type of construction (inverted structure, etc) is called a run-on—can you point me to the post?
This rare inverted structure is and has always been a correct sentence structure in English (at least, as long as the GMAT has existed!). So this isn't an example of the GMAT evolving in the sense that they gave this exact structure before and called it wrong. (An example of this kind of evolution would be past instances where they called "like" incorrect when it was used to mean "for example," but now they do not test us on knowing that "like" is technically supposed to mean "similar to." Using the word like to mean for example has become so common in the real world that they no longer test it.)
The GMAT doesn't test every possible grammatical structure, so we only add a particular rule or idiom to the "GMAT canon" when the GMAT releases a problem that explicitly tests a certain structure. In that sense, this is an example of the GMAT evolving, because they started testing something that hadn't appeared before (or, at least, hadn't appeared in so long that nobody had examples of it).
And it tends to happen in this way: Everyone learns certain rules, such as "you have to have not...but" or you have to have "not only...but also," and then they find rare cases to mess with us on really hard problems. I've also seen them do this with the word being—about 20 years ago, every problem that had being was incorrect...and so everyone just assumed being was always wrong...and then they started tossing in problems that correctly used being.
