Even though the state has spent ten years and seven million dollars pl

Dear csaluja,

I see that Shraddha at eGMAT responded, and I will add a few more thoughts.

You are correct that (E) is strong and direct and confident in its phrasing and that's a GOOD thing! First of all, think about advertising and other business talk. Imagine the person whose sale pitch is, "Gee, maybe my product might make some kind of difference in your marketing." That lily-livered disaster will put that salesperson out of business! By contrast, consider the person who says, "I know that my product will shoot your sales numbers through the ceiling! You will have so many new sales that you won't know what to do with them!" That's a much more powerful and confident sales approach. Even if the two products of these two salespeople are more or less the same, the latter will wildly outsell the former because of the power of his message. It's that way in all of business: if you can't speak with conviction about what you are doing, then this situation begs the question why you are doing it at all!

Also, think about the real live situation of this SC question in the real world. Even though the "Ubi River," and hence the entire location, is fictional, GMAT Verbal problems always have the "feel" of something that would happen in the real world. In this river, the state was planning a reservoir, but now the river is "so heavily polluted." Do you want to drink this water? Would you want your family to drink this water? Would you want anyone's family to drink this water? Of course not! Since it's clear that this is not going to become a reservoir, is there any reason to sink a few million more dollars into it? Do you want to pay for that? Again, of course not! This sentence properly needs to be phrased with words that have the same ring of certainty and conviction that the phrase "of course not!" has.

Here's (A):
Even though the state has spent ten years and seven million dollars planning a reservoir along the Ubi River, the project will have to be abandoned as a result of the river becoming so heavily polluted.
That has the urgency of a cold bowl of oatmeal. It's pathetically weak and spineless. The phrasing employs the passive voice for the main verb of the sentence. I would say the "becoming" is a gerund: it's position as a cause is casual and questionable, but certainly the sentence would have more punch if there were another verb rather than a verb form. This is a wordy flaccid disaster.

Compare (E):
Even though the state has spent ten years and seven million dollars planning a reservoir along the Ubi River, the project must be abandoned because the river has become so heavily polluted.
Two strong verbs: "must be abandoned" (passive but emphatic) and "has become." This version crackles with decisiveness. Yes! This really is a problem! We really need to do something about it! This sentence has the feel of urgency and significance appropriate to the situation.

My friend, if you interpret GMAT SC only at the level of what's happening with the grammar, you will miss more than half of what is going on. On the harder question, the GMAT loves to have incorrect answer choices that are 100% grammatically correct but wrong for other reasons. On a well-written GMAT SC sentence, grammar and logic and rhetoric all work together to support a single meaning. Here, the strong clear direct language in (E) is a wonderful example of the rhetoric supporting the meaning.

Does all this make sense?
Mike