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rical Construction; Logical Predication The sentence refers to an announcement by a city’s administration officials, conveying their belief that, for the next year, the city will have a greater budget deficit than predicted two months earlier. The budget deficit is a gap between what is budgeted for next year and the amount expected to be available from the city’s revenue for next year. The sentence is flawed in how it expresses the comparison between the deficit amount predicted earlier and the deficit amount predicted later. The preposition over is not idiomatic for comparing one sum of money with a lesser sum. The role of it in the sentence is unclear; does it refer to the gap or is it the impersonal it that could be correctly used in a passive-voice phrase such as it was predicted that . . . ? In either case, the underlined phrase is incoherent. A.As explained above, this version creates an incoherent sentence and fails to render the required comparison idiomatically. B.The noun the prediction does not strictly refer to a sum of money and so cannot correctly be compared with one. Even if the prediction could be read as meaning the same as the predicted amount, the preposition over is not idiomatic for comparing one sum of money with another. C.More than can be used to compare two sums of money. However, no sum of money is clearly designated here as the second element of the comparison. The phrasing than it was predicted is unclear, in part because, as explained above, the import of the pronoun it is unclear. If we take it as referring back to the gap, we still have an inadequate expression of the second element of the comparison. Either the gap will be more than it was predicted to be or the gap will be more than was predicted would make sense, but the gap will be more than it was predicted does not. D.Correct. The comparative phrase more than is used correctly to compare two sums of money—in this case the later predicted budget-deficit amount and the earlier one, 3.7 billion dollars and 2.7 billion dollars respectively. This version is idiomatically read as elliptical: more than [the amount] they had predicted. The pronoun they refers correctly to the administration officials mentioned. E.The phrase more than can be used to compare two sums of money. However, in this case, the second element of the comparison is not correctly expressed: than they predicted it is unidiomatic and does not make sense. The meaning conveyed by the simple-past verb form predicted is unlikely to be what is intended. The past perfect had predicted would be preferable because it is almost certainly meant to refer to a time previous to a past event, the officials’ announcement.