Official Solution:A minor league baseball team has for several years pressured its agency to implement an advertising campaign
targeted to young supporters who need a superstar to idolize and older fans who enjoy reminiscing about the beginning days of the sport.
A. targeted to young supporters who need a superstar to idolize and older fans
B. targeted at young supporters who need a superstar to idolize and for older fans
C. targeted at young supporters who need a superstar to idolize and older fans
D. with the targets of young supporters who need a superstar to idolize and of older fans
E. targeting to young supporters who need a superstar to idolize and to older fans
A campaign cannot be
targeted to someone; it must be
targeted at someone. This sentence is not idiomatically correct; the preposition
to must be changed to the preposition
at.
When answer choices differ because they use different prepositions, focus on the expression in which the preposition is used, and try to recall the list of common idioms. This campaign has two targets,
young supporters and
older fans. These targets must be introduced by the preposition
at.
Choice C changes
to to
at; the campaign is
targeted at young supporters and older fans. This change fixes the idiomatic error without introducing additional errors. The answer is
C.
Choice B changes
to to
at in order to introduce the first group, the young supporters. However, by inserting
for before the second group, choice B creates a new idiomatic error.
Targeted...for older fans is not correct. When an idiom applies to more than one item in a sentence, as it does here, make sure that all items that use the idiom are correct.
Choice D uses
targets of, which is equally as unidiomatic as
targeted to or
targeted for Choice E retains the idiomatically incorrect
targeting to.
Answer: C
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