Question
The Life and Casualty Company hopes that by increasing its environmental fund revenues to $1.2 billion, that it has set aside enough to pay for environmental claims and no longer has to use its profits and capital to pay those claims bit by bit, year by year.
Option A
Option B
Option C
Option D
Option E
(This question is from Official Guide. Therefore, because of copyrights, the complete question cannot be copied here. The question can be accessed at GMAT Club)
Solution
Sentence Analysis
- The Life and Casualty Company hopes that (Main Clause. Subject – “The Life and Causality Company”; Verb – “hopes”)
- by increasing its environmental fund revenues to $1.2 billion, (prepositional phrase modifying the “that” clause)
- that it (“that” is repeated here. This repetition is incorrect. “it” is the subject of the “that” clause)
- has set aside enough to pay for environmental claims (first verb of “that” clause – “has set aside”)
- and no longer has to use its profits and capital (second verb of “that” clause – “has”)
- to pay those claims bit by bit, year by year. (infinitive phrase modifying “use”)
The sentence talks about what Life and Casualty Company hopes. It hopes that by increasing its environmental fund revenues to a level, it has enough to pay for environmental claims and does not need to set aside some amount every year to pay those claims.
The sentence has the following problems:
- The repetition of “that” is incorrect.
- Since the “hope” is forward looking i.e. looking into the future, as indicated by “bit by bit, year by year”, the use of future tense “will no longer have to” is preferable over the present tense “no longer has to”.
Option Analysis
(A) Incorrect. For the reasons mentioned above.
(B) Incorrect. For the following reasons:
- As is, “it will no longer” seems like an independent clause. To indicate that it is also a part of “hope”, “that” needs to be repeated before this clause. In general, “that” needs to be repeated for every clause for parallelism and also for meaning clarity.
- Since the beginning modifier is “by increasing…”, it is highly preferable to have the subject of the clause the entity that will be doing the action of “increasing”. However, in this case, “enough” is the subject of the clause, leaving one in doubt “who has increased…?”
- The position of “no longer” after “will have” is incorrect. The correct positions are “will no longer have to” and “no longer will have to”.
(C) Incorrect. “having” is not parallel to anything before ‘and’.
(D) Incorrect. For the following reasons:
- “having” acts as a verb-ing modifier modifying the preceding clause and thus needs to make sense with the subject of the preceding clause, which is “enough”. Clearly, “having” doesn’t make sense with “enough”.
- Problem no. 2 of option B.
(E) Correct. Both the problems of the original sentence have been rectified in this option.
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hi sir
thanks for the wonderful explanation
i have one doubt :-
in the correct answer E, shouldn’t there be “THAT after and” i.e. the correct answer should read like this “it has set aside enough t o pay for environmental
claims , and THAT IT will no longer have” (capitalized words + comma added) in order to parallelism to hold for the verb hopes
Hi Anoop,
Option E is correct as is. The general rule is that ‘that’ needs to be repeated only if without ‘that’, the part after ‘and’ seems like an independent clause. In option E, the part after E is “will no…”, which is not an independent clause.
I hope it helps.
– CJ
It was very helpful.
Thanks a lot
Hi Sir,
Thanks for all the explanations.
My doubt is in option (C). Is ‘For payment of environment claims’ correct here or ‘to pay for environmental claims’ as in the original sentence preferred here? ‘To’ is signifying the purpose and ensuring that the payment is done by the company, which is not the case with ‘for payment’. Am I correct?
Don’t we say “saved enough for retirement”? I think “to pay” may be slightly preferred over “for payment” here; but not a big issue.
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