Larget bank and data-processing costs

[BlueDragon2010]

While larger 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

[Patrick_GMATFix]

Subject-Verb agreement
"cost/costs...are prohibitive"

Parallelism
"costs of/associated with upgrading equipment...and with the development..."

The answer is B. I go through the question in detail in the full solution below (taken from the GMATFix App).



-Patrick