Consumers may not think of household cleaning products to be hazardous

This question doesn’t test a terribly difficult set of concepts, but I still see a lot of errors on it, mostly because people tend to miss the pronouns “them” and “they” in the non-underlined portion. If you catch those right away, it’s a little bit easier to get to the right answer efficiently, as we discussed in this YouTube video.

The idiom is one problem with (A): the correct idiom is “think of X as”, not “think of X to be.”

But let’s suppose that you don’t know that. After all, there are somewhere around 25,000 idioms in English; you don’t plan to memorize all of them, right?

Even if the idiom escapes you, the GMAT still gives you a decent reason to eliminate (A): the pronouns “they” and “them” are ambiguous, because both “consumers” and “household cleaning products” are plural. And you could argue that because “many of them” is the subject of the 2nd clause of the sentence, it most likely refers back to the subject of the 1st clause (“consumers”), and that would make the sentence illogical: “many of [the consumers] can be harmful to health…” (For more on the nuances of this particular type of pronoun issue, check out this video, and we also discussed this specific question in a more recent video.)

To be fair, this is tricky stuff, and I’m not 100% certain that the pronouns are WRONG in (A). After all, pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule on the GMAT (more on that in the same pronoun video mentioned above).

So if you aren’t sure about the idiom and wanted to be conservative, you could keep (A). But as we’ll see in a moment, there are answer choices that fix the pronoun issue completely.

I definitely can’t come up with any reason why we would say “think of X being…” I can’t even figure out what “being” is trying to do in that sentence, to be honest.

Plus, the pronoun issue mentioned in (A) is still a problem. See the explanation for (A) if you want more rambling (and resources) about the pronouns.

Anyway, (B) is out.
This one is the easiest to eliminate. Sure, the word “being” doesn’t really make any sense in here (see the explanation for (B) for more on this), but the bigger issue is that “their” has no referent, since “a consumer” is singular.

So (C) is definitely out.

OK, so (D) very nicely cleans up the pronoun issue we described in answer choice (A). Because “a consumer” is now singular, “many of them” and “their” (in the non-underlined portion) MUST refer back to the only remaining plural noun, “household cleaning products.” And that makes perfect sense: it’s the “household cleaning products” that are hazardous to health, not the consumers.

So we can keep (D).

The biggest problem with (E) is that it’s a passive version of (D). Passive voice isn’t automatically WRONG on the GMAT, but you need to have a really, really good reason to use it. Consider the following two sentences:

• Charlie ate three kilograms of dosas. → Active voice, since the grammatical subject of the sentence (Charlie) actually “performs” the action (“ate”).
• Three kilograms of dosas were eaten by Charlie. → Passive voice, since the main action of the sentence (eating) is performed by a noun (Charlie) which is no longer the subject of the sentence.

Again, the second version isn’t WRONG, but it’s a silly and inefficient way to write that particular sentence.

The same is true of (E): why say “household cleaning products may not be thought of, by consumers, as…” when we could just start the sentence with a nice, clean subject and verb (“Consumers may not think of household cleaning products…”), like the version in (D)?

(D) is better than (E), so it’s our winner.