then there is a bigger Question?
"It is very likely that there will be rain today"???
IS this sentence can't stand alone? / is "IT" here is dangling?
I am not sure whether 'it is unlikely' is justified in this sentence because here it can cause a pronoun reference error... I discarded the option on the basis of 'to be' form as one error is enough to discard an option :)
on a more general note.. i think a sentence is correct if it says
"It is likely that the economy will rise" ..but is kind of wordy.. we could say "the economy is likely to rise"
Hi - wanted to share a point regarding the expletives "it and "there" related to the above discussion.
It & There are not preferred in the beginning of a sentence because both are expletives, which are words that have no referents. Expletives does not make a sentence wrong. It is very similar to the use of being on the GMAT. Being is not preferred but it is correct in some cases.
Therefore, don't avoid a sentence simply because it has a syntactic expletive. Discard the expletives only if there is a better answer choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive# ... expletives
Syntactic expletives are words that perform a syntactic role but contribute nothing to meaning. Expletive subjects are part of the grammar of many non-pro-drop languages such as English, whose clauses normally require overt provision of subject even when the subject can be pragmatically inferred (for an alternative theory considering expletives like there as a dummy predicates rather than a dummy subject based on the analysis of the copula see Moro 1997 in the list of references cited here). Consider this example:
"It is important that you work hard for the exam."
Following the eighteenth-century conception of pronoun, Bishop Robert Lowth objected that since it is a pronoun, it should have an antecedent. Since it cannot function like that in Latin, Lowth said that the usage was incorrect in English.
Whether or not it is a pronoun here (and linguists today would say that it is one), English is not Latin; and the sentence was and is fully acceptable to native speakers of English and thus was and is grammatical. It has no meaning here; it merely serves as a dummy subject. (It is sometimes called preparatory it or prep it, or a dummy pronoun.)
It is worth noting that Bishop Lowth did not condemn sentences that use there as an expletive, even though it is one in for example:
"There are ten desks here."
The nomenclature used for the constituents of sentences such as this is still a matter of some dispute, but there might be called subject, are copula, and ten desks predicate nominal. Meanwhile here is an adverbial phrase that conveniently reveals the semantic vacuity of there in this example.
There is some disagreement over whether the it in such sentences as
"It is raining now."
are expletives. Whereas it makes no sense to ask what the it refers to in "It is important that you work hard for the exam", some people might say that the dummy it in "It is raining now" refers to the weather (even if the word weather has not previously been mentioned). Thus the it in such sentences is sometimes called expletive, sometimes a weather "it". Compare with weather verb.
Hope this info helps some of you.
Just like swimming is good exercise,skiing is a great way to burn calories.
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