Sentence Correction Practice

Sentence Correction Practice

 Under the Forestry Protection Act, the Australian  Forest Service is required either to certify individual counties’ plans for managing the containment of wildfires or that they implement their  own plan for counties that lack appropriate regulation.

a) that they implement their

b) for implementing their

c) they should implement their

d) it should implement its

e) to implement its

ANSWER E

Solution

The GMAT loves prepositional parallelism.  In fact, generally, the GMAT likes to repeat the very same preposition--"with," "after," "against," whatever--to emphasize parallelism, even when they don't have as good a reason as they do here.

There are actually two ways to use the preposition "to" to accompany a list of infinitive verbs.  You can repeat the "to" with each verb: "I like to eat most of the day, to sleep most of the night, and to watch cartoons whenever I'm not eating or sleeping."  Or you can distribute the "to" over the entire list: "I like to eat most of the day, sleep most of the night, and watch cartoons whenever I'm not eating or sleeping."  On the GMAT, the credited response will almost always repeat the "to," rather than distributing it.  The only likely exceptions are when the phrases that form the list are very short, just one or two words, such as, "I like to eat, sleep, and watch cartoons."

OK, so that means we expect the word "to" to start the underlined section. 

 Only answer choice E starts with "to."

By the way, the the singular subject, “Australian Forest Service” must be referred to by a singular pronoun.