Congress has enacted legislation forbidding state and local government

The correct idomatic form of "forbid" is "forbid .... to"

The only sentence that has this in the right form is "c".


We can also eliminate answers based on intended meaning of the original sentence.

The intended meaning is -- no tax increase for next 3 years on connections to the internet.

Eliminate A, idiom error + it sounds like the next three years modifies the act of connecting to the internet.
Eliminate B, idiom error + it sounds like the next three years refers to the Govt. itself
Eliminate D, Non sensical
Eliminate E, idiom error

Hence right answer is C.

can anyone elaborate why choice A is wrong except for the wrong idiom?thanks

...that link consumers to the Internet for the next three years [As in A]

...that for the next three years forbids state and local governments... [As in C]

the legislation forbids government for three years to do something...this should be proper meaning of the sentence.
However, in A it looks like consumers are linked to the Internet for the next three years. This doesn't match with the intended meaning of the sentence.


Hope it helps!

This was a very interesting problem. Here's what I did:

There is a clear 3/2 split in the beginning of this problem. The legislation forbids something. So get rid of A/D.

Now we're looking at B, C, and E.

At first, I wanted to eliminate C because I don't like the "forbids to raise" phrase. I haven't studied this idiom. Then looking at B and E, these are basically the same sentence. I don't think I've seen that in a SC problem before. I mean, just think about the guys writing this test. It is pretty unlikely they would write a question with a choice like that. So I went back to C which I would probably chalk up to a guess as I haven't seen this idiom before. That's actually why I came to this forum, though!

Ultimately, this isn't that great of a question IMO. My take on the idioms thing is that there are far more productive things you can than put a lot of effort into than idioms. For instance, just having seen this problem before will now enable us all to choose the correct answer if we ever stumble upon "forbids to" again.

Hi guys,
I checked the Oxford dictionary and: forbid sb from doing sth is the correct idioms.
And thing else could eliminate A ?

I am not sure about the idiom issue because I googled it and found that "forbid to" and "forbid from" are both correct idioms with few subtle differences, but option A surely has meaning issues.

Option A: just read the bold red part.

Congress has enacted legislation forbidding state and local governments from raising taxes on connections that link consumers to the Internet for the next three years.

still having confusion as to why choice C is correct and choice B is incorrect

B. "....FORBIDS state and local governments for the next three years FROM raising taxes......."forbids from" is wrong idiom. ("Prevent from", "forbid to" are correct usages.)
C. "....FORBIDS state and local governments TO raise taxes..." "forbids to" is correct.

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