Question
It may someday be worthwhile to try to recover uranium from seawater, but at present this process is prohibitively expensive.
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
- It may someday be worthwhile to try (First IC: Subject: “to try” Verb: “may be”)
- to recover uranium from seawater, (Infinitive Phrase – modifies “try”)
- but at present this process is prohibitively expensive. (Second IC: Subject: “this process” Verb: “is”)
Sometime in the future, to try to recover uranium from seawater may be worthwhile. However, currently, this process is economically impossible.
The sentence has no issues and is correct as is.
Option Analysis
(A) Correct.
(B) Incorrect. “Try and recover” is incorrect. The point is to try to recover; “try” and “recover” are not two different actions.
(C) Incorrect. For the following reasons:
- “Recover x out of y” is incorrect. The correct idiom is “recover x from y”.
- With this option, “this process” of the non-underlined part will refer to “trying to recover uranium”. Logically, “this process” should refer to “recover uranium”.
(D) Incorrect. For the following reasons:
- The first error of option C
- “To try to recover uranium” is much better than “to try for the recovery of uranium”, just as “to try to reduce weight” is much better than “to try for the reduction in the weight”. The first construction emphasizes the action that is being tried.
(E) Incorrect. “To do” is incorrect. If we replace ‘do’ with ‘recover’, the redundancy is evident. “Recovering …. to try someday” would work.
If you have any doubts regarding any part of this solution, please feel free to ask in the comments section.
This solution was created by Chiranjeev Singh and Anish Passi.
HI CJ, I don’t understand how “to try” acts as subject of first IC? It – Pronoun which is placed at start of the first IC clause can also function as Subject Isnt it?
Here, “it” is a placeholder pronoun. Right? Thus, something else has to be the subject since “it” is just a placeholder. Now, the question is, “what may someday be worthwhile?”
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