At nearly 38 million dollars, one of the least costly options being co

Pls explain the mistakes of each answer choice. I can eliminate (A) only as it distorts the meaning.

The biggest problem in E is that "Ultimately rejected due not just to its sizable budget but also to its considerable risk" is written as a MODIFIER of the following clause, which is about the total cost of the proposal. That's nonsense, because these are two unrelated ideas. (The LACK of a relationship is, in fact, explicitly attested! The modifier specifically says that the proposal was NOT rejected for any reason having to do with budgeting.)

"Due to" is misused in choice E, too.
"Due to" modifies a noun, not a whole clause. You should be able to replace "due to" with "caused by". If you make that substitution here, you'll see that the resulting sentence doesn't work—so neither does the original version with "due to".

Nothing wrong with that.
Remember, choice A is just another random answer choice! The "original meaning" is NOT special, privileged, or presumptively correct.
Like the other four choices, choice A either makes sense or doesn't; that decision is not affected by the fact that it's the first answer choice.

If choice A is nonsense, or has a meaning that's otherwise clearly wrong in context, then the correct answer will HAVE to change the meaning!

For choice E, please see my post directly above.

C and D do the basic mechanics of parallelism incorrectly. Analyzing basic parallel structures is one of the most important skills in SC, so I won't discuss anything else in those choices. (You shouldn't pursue any distractions until you can successfully call out mechanical non-parallelism quickly and with basically NO effort.)

The parallel structure in each of those choices is "NOT _____ BUT _____". The parts strictly FOLLOWING the two parallel markers should match.

So...

• ...rejected NOT on account of xxxxx BUT on account of yyyyy...
= CORRECT
(note that "rejected" appears BEFORE, and therefore OUTSIDE, the entire parallel construction. It is not included in either half.)

• ...NOT rejected on account of xxxxx BUT on account of yyyyy...
= INCORRECT
("rejected" falls within the first of the two parallel parts this time. There's nothing in the second part to match it.)

Make sure you can do a similar analysis to call out C and D as wrong.

Could you please explain why Option "E" is incorrect? Thank You!

The biggest problem in E is that "Ultimately rejected due not just to its sizable budget but also to its considerable risk" is written as a MODIFIER of the following clause, which is about the total cost of the proposal. That's nonsense, because these are two unrelated ideas. (The LACK of a relationship is, in fact, explicitly attested! The modifier specifically says that the proposal was NOT rejected for any reason having to do with budgeting.)

"Due to" is misused in choice E, too.
"Due to" modifies a noun, not a whole clause. You should be able to replace "due to" with "caused by". If you make that substitution here, you'll see that the resulting sentence doesn't work—so neither does the original version with "due to".

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