As the city council wants to cut down the city’s average yearly ...
As the city council wants to cut down the city’s average yearly expenditure on its power supply to buildings housing public sector offices, the council members opine that the city council will easily slash its current expenditure to half if they would replace the air-conditioning units that had been currently in use with more environment-friendly ones.
Meaning Analysis
- As the city council wants to cut down the city’s average yearly expenditure on its power supply to buildings
- housing public sector offices,
- the council members opine
- that the city council will easily slash its current expenditure to half
- if they would replace the air-conditioning units
- that had been currently in use with more environment-friendly ones.
The sentence says that the city council wants to reduce the city’s average yearly expense on power supply to those buildings that have public sector offices. In order to do so, the council members think that if the council replaces the air-conditioning units that currently run in these offices with more environment-friendly ones, it will easily reduce the current expenditure to half.
Error Analysis
1) The plural pronoun “they” does not agree in number with its singular noun antecedent “council”.
2) This sentence uses the “if… then…” construction. The “then” clause – “the city council will easily slash…” – in the non-underlined portion of the sentence is written in the simple future tense. This requires the “if” clause to be written in the simple present tense. Hence the use of “would” is incorrect.
3) Also use of past perfect tense verb “had been” is incorrect because the air-conditioning units are currently in use.
Answer Choices
A
they would replace the air-conditioning units that had been
Incorrect: This choice has the errors found in the error analysis.
B
it replaces the air-conditioning units
Correct:
This choice corrects all the errors of Choice A. The singular pronoun “it” correctly refers to “the council”, and use of the simple present tense verb “replaces” in the “if” clause is correct. This choice also removes the past perfect verb tense error.
C
it would replace the air-conditioning units
Incorrect:
This choice repeats the “would” verb tense error of Choice A.
D
they replaced the air-conditioning units that are
Incorrect:
1) This choice repeats the pronoun error of Choice A.
2) Use of the simple past tense verb “replaced” in the “if” clause is incorrect as the “then” clause is written in the simple future tense.
E
it were to replace the air-conditioning units that were
Incorrect:
1) This choice retains the verb tense error of Choice D. Use of the conditional verb “were to” is incorrect because the “then” clause is written in the simple future tense.
2) Use of the simple past tense verb “were” is incorrect because the air-conditioning units are currently in use.