BB Grammar Question

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1

<p>Surface mining is safer, quicker, and cheaper than deep mining, but [the greater is its toll in human misery.]</p>

<p>A. the greater is its toll in human misery
b. it has a greater human misery toll
c. in its human misery toll it is greater
d. there is the greater toll in human misery
e. its toll in human misery is greater</p>

<p>I chose B because I thought that it was concise and used the active voice to describe surface mining. The correct answer is E. though. E. seemed to be the most clear answer, but it was less direct than B.</p>

<p>More explanations of why E is the right answer please, and how B was not?</p>

2

<p>^ Agreed.</p>

<p>I think it might be parallelism, ‘_____ is Quicker,Cheater,’</p>

<p>So, ‘toll in human is Greater.’</p>

3

<p>If you remove ‘human misery’ from option E, it sounds perfectly correct.</p>

4

<p>But option B also uses a comparative tense, like option E. If I remove “human misery” from option B, it sounds perfectly correct too.</p>

5

<p>No, B is not consistent.</p>

6

<p>“human misery toll”</p>

<p>Does that sound correct? To me, it naturally sounds wrong.</p>

7

<p>See [The</a> Coordinating Conjunction](<a href=“http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/coordinatingconjunction.htm]The”>The Coordinating Conjunction | Grammar Bytes!).</p>

<p>The comma after “mining” tells us we will be joining two main clauses using the coordinating conjunction “but.”</p>

<p>Both solutions B and E are grammatically correct, but solution E is better because it makes a stronger statement by identifying toll as the subject of the second main clause; parallelism helps E as well.</p>

<p>B. Surface mining is safer, quicker, and cheaper than deep mining, but it has a greater human misery toll. (Second clause = it has a greater human misery toll.)</p>

<p>E. Surface mining is safer, quicker, and cheaper than deep mining, but its toll in human misery is greater. (Second clause = its toll in human misery is greater.)</p>

<p>If no comma had been present after “mining,” the likely solution would have involved the compound predicate "is … but has …</p>