ways to being / ways that begin

**budhi** · 06-23-2005, 06:21 PM

Many environmentalists believe that the widespread planting of trees, along with the conservation of existing forests, would be one of the surest, easiest, and least expensive ways to begin to halt or even to reverse the buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.
(A) one of the surest, easiest, and least expensive ways to begin to halt or even to reverse
(B) one of the most sure, easy, and least expensive ways to begin a halt or even reverse
(C) one of the surest, easiest, and least expensive ways that would begin halting or even reversing
(D) a most sure, easy, and inexpensive way beginning the halting and even reversing of
(E) the most sure, easiest, and inexpensive way that would begin halting or even reversing

SPOILER: Official Answer - A .

IMO :C. Why is the Official Answer better than C?

**snow white** · 06-23-2005, 06:44 PM

ts the case of parallelism...

by parallelism i mean that when words describe identical things about....they should take the same part of speech...

it would have been wrong if you would have opted for C as the answer coz...then instead of *buildup...it should have been building up...for it to be right*but as it is not...Official Answer fits best...as it satisfies the parallelism in the construction of the sentence.

p.s.-the problem of parallelism is something that we normally gloss over,& do not pay much attention to it.however,these problems are quite simple to identify only if we are attentive and have our eyes open out for them.

i hope this helps..

cheers!

**karmaholic** · 06-23-2005, 07:08 PM

Well said! Apart from parallelism watch out for the "tense". Though i guess identifying if something is parallel or not is sufficient but at times things do get further complicated.
I hope someone comes up with a clean and precise explanation. Has to be A instead ot C.

**mananmehra** · 06-23-2005, 07:39 PM

If we need to consider parelell structure how about this-

The widespread planting of tree is the surest...way to begin halting or even reversing
the build of co2 in air

**karmaholic** · 06-23-2005, 08:16 PM

Connect the object/subject to its corresponding verb. And find paralellism in with reference to what tense/state the object/subject is.

Conservation of ... one of ... buildup of. Is the parallel enough yet?