Correct Idiom: risk of causing. Ans. B
the word whose idiomatic usage is being tested is risk, not chance.
this is a bit hard to see in this particular sentence, so here's an analogy
as small a collection as three pirated albums has occasionally drawn the attention of the recording industry.
in this case, 'collection', not 'albums', is the subject of 'has drawn' (which can be inferred from the fact that 'has' is
singular).
this is the case because this sentence is equivalent to the following rearranged version:
a collection as small as three pirated albums has occasionally drawn the attention of the recording industry.
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the same reasoning applies here; you're looking for idiomatic usage that agrees with 'risk', not 'chance'.
'chance to' is NOT used when 'chance' refers to a mathematical probability (as it does in this context). in the case of
mathematical probabilities, you can only use 'chance of'.
for instance, you can't say this treatment has a 70% chance to cure the disease; you have to say chance of curing.
the analogy is meant to show that the word "chance" is, in all of these choices, part of a modifier that is entirely
disposable.
the first three choices are analogous to my first sentence above:
original:
as little risk as one chance in a million of causing
analogy:
as small a collection as three pirated albums has occasionally drawn...
original:
a risk as little as one chance in a million for causing (note this is unidiomatic, but the correspondence is the same)
analogy:
a collection as small as three pirated albums has occasionally drawn
compare these side-by-side. note that the throwaway modifiers are in the same places.
the grammar is not quite the same (the second part is a prepositional phrase in the original, but a verb in the
analogy). however, the correspondence is exactly the same, so the analogy is good enough for illustrative purposes.
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