"Not So Much...As", "Much Less", "Let Alone" in Technical English
5 exercises — practise scalar contrast constructions for technical arguments and risk assessments.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "not so much...as" to reframe the real cause of a problem?
"The outage was not so much a code bug as a misconfigured load balancer" is correct: the fixed correlative pattern is "not so much X as Y", used to say Y is the more accurate description than X. Option B incorrectly substitutes "than" for the required second "as". Option C incorrectly inserts an extra "as" before the first noun phrase. Option D incorrectly uses "that" instead of "as" for the second element.
2 / 5
Choose the sentence that correctly uses "much less" to add an even more extreme, unlikely case after a negative statement.
"The intern can't even read the stack trace, much less debug the root cause" is correct: "much less" after a negative clause is followed by the bare base form of the verb, parallel to the first verb ("read"). Option B incorrectly adds "-s" to "debug". Option C incorrectly inserts "to" before the base verb, which "much less" doesn't take. Option D incorrectly uses the gerund "debugging" instead of the bare base form.
3 / 5
Which sentence correctly uses "let alone" for an even more improbable scenario in a risk assessment?
"We don't have capacity to handle double the traffic, let alone a tenfold spike" is correct: "let alone" is directly followed by the noun phrase it emphasizes, with no extra preposition or verb. Option B incorrectly inserts "to" before the noun phrase. Option C incorrectly inserts "for". Option D incorrectly inserts "is", which breaks the fixed pattern.
4 / 5
Select the sentence that correctly uses "not so much...as" to compare two verb phrases (not just nouns) in a retrospective.
"The issue was not so much caused by bad code as by insufficient testing" is correct: the parallel structure keeps "by" on both sides of "as" ("caused by X as by Y"), maintaining grammatical symmetry. Option B incorrectly uses "than" instead of "as". Option C breaks parallelism by adding an unnecessary "was" after the second element. Option D incorrectly uses the base form "cause" instead of the past participle "caused".
5 / 5
Which sentence correctly stacks "much less" after a negative statement about capability, matching verb forms on both sides?
"The legacy script can't parse UTF-8 input, much less handle emoji correctly" is correct: the second verb after "much less" matches the bare base form of the first verb ("parse" / "handle"), maintaining parallel structure. Option B incorrectly uses the past tense "handled". Option C incorrectly uses the gerund "handling". Option D incorrectly inserts a full subject-verb clause "it handles" instead of the required bare verb.