daagh wrote:
It must be also mentioned that B could be correct if it used due to instead of 'because of'.
Quote:
(B) the annual cost of illiteracy to the United States is at least $20 billion due to lost industrial output and tax revenues
If we want to use
due to as an adjective, we would
not want a
due to in there.
X is due to Y.This could be acceptable.
X is $20 billion due to Y.This is not acceptable. We're not talking about either
X or
$20 billion separately.
Let me know if I've overlooked something. I'd be happy to know about it.
aashishlandmark wrote:
But in
the official guide explanation it says that the idiom "Because of " is incorrect here.
Look at this as a meaning issue rather than something to do with grammar. The
because of is incorrect because it does not give us the right meaning. We are not looking to provide the
reason for something here. Instead, we're looking to provide, loosely speaking, a
category.
Last year, we lost $20,000 because of bad marketing.The
bad marketing bit identifies the
cause of the loss, but not the
type of the loss ("category").
Last year, bad marketing cost us $20,000 in lost revenue.Last year, bad marketing cost us $20,000 in lost profits.Last year, bad marketing cost us $20,000 in lost goodwill.You can see here that
lost revenue/profits/goodwill is not something that tells us what the problem was (the problem was bad marketing). Instead, it's telling us what that $20,000 was "made of". In other words, the possibility that bad marketing actually led to a much larger overall loss exists. That is, maybe the overall loss was $60,000 (20 in R + 20 in P + 20 in G). So we could even combine those sentences and say something like this:
Last year, bad marketing cost us $5,000 in lost revenue, $10,000 in lost profits, and $20,000 in lost goodwill.