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cost Vs costs

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by cks » Wed Feb 27, 2008 4:07 pm
Can some one help me to understand the singular/plural question.

"These shoes cost $100" Shoes - Plural Cost - Plural
"This mistake cost him his job" Mistake - Singular Cost - Singular ???

I thought 'cost' is plural and 'costs' is singular..
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by smushkas » Wed Feb 27, 2008 4:36 pm
Hey there,

In the second sentence "cost" is in the past tense.
https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/i ... /cost.html

Hope this helps.
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by cks » Wed Feb 27, 2008 5:40 pm
Let me post the original question from OG 11 SC Q 41

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

A cost associated with
B costs associated with
C costs arising from
D cost of
E costs of

OA is B.

Here the "costs" is considered as Plural WHY??
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by Stuart@KaplanGMAT » Wed Feb 27, 2008 9:07 pm
cks wrote:Let me post the original question from OG 11 SC Q 41

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

A cost associated with
B costs associated with
C costs arising from
D cost of
E costs of

OA is B.

Here the "costs" is considered as Plural WHY??
Cost could certainly have been singular if this sentence were written differently.

A cardinal rule of sentence correction is that you have to change the underlined part to match the non-underlined part. If a word isn't underlined, then it's correct.

In the non-underlined part, we have "are prohibitive" - a plural verb. Since we have a plural verb, we need a plural noun - in this case, "costs".

The sentence also would be correct if "are prohibitive" were changed to "is prohibitive", but we're not allowed to do that in this case.
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by cks » Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:03 am
Stuart Kovinsky,

Thanks for the explanation.
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by lunarpower » Fri Mar 07, 2008 2:10 am
this is obvious enough that you've probably noticed it, but i'll do my due diligence and post it anyway: your example uses completely different words than does the og example you've posted.

your example uses cost(s) as a verb (and conflates the present and past tenses, too).

the og example uses cost(s) as a noun, which must be chosen to agree with the verb that appears later in the sentence.

these are in effect two different words - one a noun, the other a verb - that just happen to look the same. any correlations between them, though, are spurious and should be ignored in the name of proper grammar.
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by yalephd2007 » Sun Apr 13, 2008 4:57 pm
Costs should be used.
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by moadhia » Tue Mar 10, 2009 7:08 pm
I was wondering about the answer choices given. Would

- cost associated with
- cost arising from
- cost of

mean the same thing in this sentence?? The OG discards them because they are not parallel but would the meaning of the sentence stay the same with these 3 choices ? Just curious to know.
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by pravsj » Wed Apr 28, 2010 8:57 am
Reopening this thread.
Hi Ron,
I still have the confusion regarding the usage of 'are'.Is this 'are' not indicates to two clauses assoicated with And conjuction.
cost associated with upgrading data-processing equipment and with the development and maintenance of new products and technical staff are prohibitive

can you please help me to explain this confusion.
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by GMAT Mantra » Mon Sep 10, 2018 7:15 pm
https://youtu.be/cm2ZGlx3aJY
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