With total sales of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer new subscribers than last year, the New England Theater Company is in danger of losing its building.

A. of less than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

B. lower than three hundred thousand dollars and less

C. lesser than three hundred thousand dollars and fewer

D. fewer than three hundred thousand dollars and less

E. of fewer than three hundred thousand dollars and of fewer


Please explain how you have eliminated each option.
Thanks .

You should use less than for uncountable entities and fewer than for countable entities...
We have subscribers, which is a countable...So, we should use fewer than and not less than. So, this eliminates B and D...
MSC guide says that units of money are non countable...So, fewer than used before money is wrong in option E.
In C, lesser than is wrong..less than is fine..
Answer is A..
HTH!!

Is it that in comparison with A , C is wrong or C is grammatically incorrect.

IMO A

Since subscriber is countable noun, eliminate B and D.

Beside the usage of Few and Less, E has another error in meaning since it suggests that With total sale of xxx and total sale of new subscriber. The latter is incorrect.
So, eliminate E.

Lesser seems grammatically incorrect since Less already shows comparative meaning in itself.
Little/Less
Few/Fewer
So, eliminate C.

Positive Comparative Superlative
Little Less Least.

So, less is already in comparative form..So use of lesser is incorrect...

excellent thanks for explanation.

little confused with the usage of fewer/less with respect of 'dollars' and 'money'. As per MGSC, money is uncountable and we should use 'less' with money; but dollars are countable such as 1 dollar,2 dollars etc.
But I can see examples where we can use 'less' with dollars (option A in the above says -> With total sales of less than three hundred thousand dollars).
Similar conclusion is also mentioned in the post :
http://www.manhattangmat.com/forums/when-drive-ins-were-at-the-height-of-their-popularity-in-the-t6550.html
QUOTE
...
"Bill Gates has less than $80 billion".
...
UNQUOTE

I am little bit confused about the main 'take away' from these. Does that mean we should use 'less' for countable money also ?
Can somebody advise ?

I can understand what you mean and why you are getting confused .

We must be careful with the unit of money . Dollar here is countable that is one dollar , two dollar etc . Hence we must use fewer than , instead of less than that is also true. But what dose dollar represent here MONEY - right ?

So can you count money - one money (?) , two money (?) no . So less than should be used for money and not fewer than.

Thus one dollar ,10 gallons or 100 kilometers all are countable but what they represent is money , volume ,and distance and none of these nouns are countable .



Ex : If I say John has FEWER THAN 10 dollars .

What this would mean is John has 9 one dollar bills . But this is not what I wanted to say . What I actually meant was John has money that is less than 10 dollars and not how many dollar bills he has .

So the take away would be if you intend to say the AMOUNT of money represented by dollars is compared use less or greater .

If the sentence means to say number of bills(pieces of currency) that you can count use FEWER than .

Hope this helps!

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