JonShukhrat wrote:
Dear
IanStewartCould you please share your thoughts on answer choice B? Is it incorrect because of the time period mismatch? “could mean” refers to the events that have yet to take place while “the increasing pressure” talks about the pressure that’s already happening.
And does “the” make sense here?
We're comparing "less lending" with, in some phrasing, something that means "more pressure" (I'm just repeating what AjiteshArun said perfectly above). If you simply rephrase "less lending" in a synonymous way -- "reduced lending" -- it is immediately clear it is parallel with "increased pressure". Inserting the word "the" in one of those two phrases would disrupt that parallelism, so the "the" alone is decisive here.
If we delete the word "the" from B, you'd need to do a more subtle analysis of meaning. If we said the bank's admission will mean "increasing pressure", we'd be saying this single admission will lead to an ongoing increase in pressure. The sentence probably means that the pressure will increase at once to a new higher level. So we probably want to say it will lead to "an increase in pressure", or "increased pressure", and not that it will lead to "increasing pressure". But I think there's a reason the question didn't offer an answer choice like "increasing pressure"; if it had, you could probably justify two different answers. A post above cites some rule about types of gerund that I don't think actually exists (though I might be wrong about that -- I've never found any use for obscure rules like that).
If the "and" in the sentence immediately before the underlined portion were changed, then other answers might have been right. As written, the sentence lists two things, "lending and pressure". If instead the "and" became a comma, and the second half modified the first, we might have wanted a construction like this:
"The bank's admission could lead to less lending, increasing the pressure on governments..."
or if the "and" were used to join two complete clauses, then "increase" would become a verb, and we then might have wanted a different construction (though the earlier verb "could mean" would somehow need to agree in time with the later verb). So this construction would have been fine:
"The banks admission meant less lending, and increased the pressure on governments..."
but these two examples completely change the structure of the sentence, and we'd only have been looking for them among the answer choices if more of the sentence had been underlined.
I'd add that this question is playing a typical SC trick. It wants test takers to think "lending" and "increasing" should be parallel. But we're comparing "lending" with "pressure" here.