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This would have been a lot easier taking her in the house.

What could be the complete form of this sentence?

Context: A few hired men are going to kidnap a girl from her school so one of them is saying this sentence becaue the school option is not the easy one it is hard but they are going to do it anyway

So what I am asking is that can we reduce the sentence-1 into the sentence-2 ?

Sentence-1 :"This would have been a lot easier if we had taken her in the house."

Sentence-2 :"This would have been a lot easier taking her in the house."

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2 Answers 2

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This is a complete sentence; I assume what you're looking for is a version with the references made explicit.

From the context we readily understand that This refers to kidnapping her, and that easier compares the strategy of taking her in the house to the strategy the gang have actually embarked on, taking her from school. I imagine that the house means the victim's home.

So you could expand this as

Kidnapping her would have been a lot easier if we had tried snatching her from home instead of from school.

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  • We are so used to filling in obvious blanks mentally,we sometimes don't catch the missing word. :)
    – Lambie
    Sep 17, 2018 at 16:27
  • Taking her at school would have been a lot easier. That is also a full sentence without re-writing.
    – Lambie
    Sep 17, 2018 at 17:32
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This would have been a lot easier than taking her in the house.

The word than is missing.

This=kidnapping her from/at school.

Full sentences would be:

1) This [the school option] would have been a lot easier than taking her in the house.

or

2) Taking her at school would have been a lot easier. [no need for than, but it is implied: a lot easier than taking her at home].

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  • Or it could be, "This kidnapping would have been a lot easier if we had taken her in the house instead of at school."
    – ColleenV
    Sep 17, 2018 at 17:21
  • I'm just saying that without more context, it is ambiguous. I think it is a full sentence without than.
    – ColleenV
    Sep 17, 2018 at 17:28
  • I disagree entirely: This: "This would have been a lot easier taking her in the house." =is a sentence fragment. This is a full sentence: "This would have been a lot easier than taking her in the house." There are all types of way one could rewrite it...which is what you have done. A comparative as is found here requires the word than.
    – Lambie
    Sep 17, 2018 at 17:30
  • "This would have been easier floating in the air." complete or not, keeping in mind this is spoken English?
    – ColleenV
    Sep 17, 2018 at 17:33
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    It's a construction I encounter all the time in spoken English: taking &c isn't a gerundial but a participial modifying the referent of this, and the than complement is omitted because it is recoverable from context: "This [moving the piano] would be a lot easier pushing [than pulling]."
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Sep 17, 2018 at 17:45

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