5 exercises — practise concise comparative structures in performance reports and release notes.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses an elliptical comparative, omitting the understood second element of the comparison?
"Faster than before" is a correctly formed elliptical comparative: "before" stands in for the full clause "than [the algorithm ran] before", with the repeated subject and verb omitted because they are recoverable from context — this is a natural, concise pattern common in performance reports. Option A is grammatically complete but not elliptical (nothing is omitted); it is correct but does not illustrate ellipsis. Option C is illogical, comparing the algorithm to itself in the present ("than it runs") rather than to a past state, so no meaningful comparison is expressed. Option D is doubly redundant and ungrammatical, repeating "faster"/"was faster" inside the comparative clause itself.
2 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses an elliptical comparative to compare actual results to an expectation?
"Longer than expected" is a standard elliptical comparative: it omits the full passive clause "than [it was] expected [to take]", a highly idiomatic and extremely common pattern in status reports and postmortems for comparing an actual outcome to a prior estimate. Option B awkwardly and redundantly spells out the ellipsis with an extra, ungrammatical "it" at the end. Option C garbles the word order of the same idea. Option D changes the meaning entirely — "than it expected" would (illogically) suggest the migration itself held an expectation, rather than referring to a passive external expectation about the migration's duration.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses an elliptical comparative with "than usual" to describe an anomaly in a monitoring dashboard?
"Higher than usual" is the correct, idiomatic elliptical comparative: "usual" functions as a noun/adjective standing in for the omitted full comparison "than [CPU usage] usually [is]", a very common and natural phrase in monitoring and alerting language. Option A redundantly spells out "usual usage was", which is grammatically awkward and unnecessary given how standard the elliptical form is. Option C incorrectly uses "usual" as a predicate adjective after "it is" in a way that doesn't match the idiomatic comparative pattern. Option D misuses the adverb "usually" in a garbled word order that is not standard English.
4 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses an elliptical comparative comparing two versions of a system without repeating the compared noun?
"Higher than version 1's" correctly uses an elliptical possessive: the noun "throughput" is omitted after "version 1's" because it is understood from the first half of the sentence, and the possessive apostrophe-s stands in for the full phrase "version 1's throughput" — a concise, idiomatic comparative pattern. Option B is fully spelled out and grammatically correct, but not elliptical (illustrating the non-reduced form). Option C is a common but technically imprecise comparison: "higher than version 1" compares throughput to the version itself, not to version 1's throughput, which is a subtly illogical comparison sometimes tolerated informally but avoided in careful technical writing. Option D omits the necessary possessive marker on "version 1", producing an ungrammatical noun sequence.
5 / 5
A release note says: "The updated build is more stable _____ ." Choose the correct elliptical ending implying comparison to the previous build.
"Than the last one" is the correctly formed elliptical comparative: it omits the repeated adjective "stable" from the second half of the comparison ("than the last one [was stable]"), which is understood from context — a natural, economical way to complete the sentence. Option B awkwardly inserts "it was" before "the last one", producing a redundant and ungrammatical double reference to the same subject. Option C spells out the ellipsis with "was stable", which is grammatically valid but unnecessarily wordy compared to the standard elliptical form, and not the best fit for concise release-note style. Option D scrambles the word order of the (unreduced) comparison into a non-grammatical sequence.