Sentence Correction

While larger banks can afford to maintain their own data-processing operations , many seller regional and community banks are finding that the cost associated with upgrading data-processing equipment and wit the development and maintenance of new products and technical staff are prohibited.

A)cost associated with

B)costs associated with

C) costs arising from

D) cost of

E) costs of



OA B

Hi Experts ,

What's wrong with A

anant03 wrote:What's wrong with A

There are multiple lessons to be learned from this practice SC question.

One lesson involves finding clear decision points. The answer choices include three different idiomatic forms, costs associated with, costs arising from, and costs of. The variety of idiomatic forms serves merely as a distraction as all three are basically correct, though one could argue that costs of is the most concise. You could spend time struggling to formulate a way to choose among those three idiomatic forms, only to find that none is clearly better than any other, or you could look for clearer decision points, of which there are a few in the answer choices.

Another lesson to be learned from this question is that often getting the right answer to a SC question requires looking at parts of the sentence that are far from the underlined portion.

In this case, the tipoff that A is not the OA lies at the end of the sentence.

The tipoff is the plural verb are.

Since the plural verb are is not in the underlined portion, we have to choose an answer choice that includes a plural subject that goes with are. So A, with the singular noun, cost, does not work, as you can see in this edited form of the sentence created using choice A.

Many smaller banks are finding that the cost associated with upgrading are prohibitive.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ^singular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ^plural

I posted an explanation here:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/while-large- ... 84554.html