TheUltimateWinner wrote:
In recent years a controversy has developed around the lucrative textbook publishing market as students question if textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder over their accuracy.
A. as students question if textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder over their accuracy
B. as students question the expense and professors wonder about the accuracy of textbooks
C. where students question whether textbooks should be as expensive as they are and professors wonder whether they are accurate
D. where students are questioning if textbooks should be as expensive as they are while professors wonder if they are accurate
E. as students are questioning whether textbooks must be as expensive as they are and professors wonder about their accuracy
Source: McGraw-Hill's GMAT
The question is an interesting with idiomatic usage and a bit of parallelism thrown in.
We can start by eliminating Options C and D as they both start with the relative adverb ‘where’. The adverb is used to convey a sense of place. In this sentence, the underlined portion is a clause that tells us what the ‘controversy’ is. If the clause had to give a description of something that happened in the market, we could have used the adverb ‘where’.
Option E is the next option to be easily eliminated. This option has the unnecessary use of the present continuous tense – ‘are questioning’. The sentence expresses a general idea and the simple present tense is used to convey general or universal ideas. The continuous tense should not be used in such sentences. Further, Option E contains the verb ‘must’, which is too strong in this context.
Option A also has two errors. One is the use of the word ‘if’. This word is used only if a condition is being expressed. In this sentence, there is no such condition. The other error in Option A is the use of ‘over’ after the verb ‘wonder’. The correct idiomatic usage is ‘wonder about’.
We can therefore arrive at the best option without touching upon parallelism. However, if we find parallelism as a concept easier to deal with, we can look at the latter part of the underlined portion.
In Options D and E, “students are questioning” is not parallel to “professors wonder”. In the remaining options, parallelism is better maintained but as I have stated before, there are other errors in the other options.
Therefore, B is the best option.
Jayanthi Kumar.