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.
