general questions about preposition

[slinson]

sorry I don't know why I cannot post in General Verb fold, so I can only post it here...

e.g.

.....The mayor owes the success of reducing pollution to the new policy adopted last year.....

1. is the preposition of correctly used in the sentence above? or it should be replaced by in? what's the difference between success of doing and success in doing ?
2. is it idiomatically correct to write ' reduce pollution ' ? Or there is a more idiomatical way to express such an effort?
3. what's the difference between effort of doing sth. and effort to do sth. ?

thanks

[RonPurewal]

sorry I don't know why I cannot post in General Verb fold, so I can only post it here...

e.g.

.....The mayor owes the success of reducing pollution to the new policy adopted last year.....

1. is the preposition of correctly used in the sentence above? or it should be replaced by in? what's the difference between success of doing and success in doing ?
2. is it idiomatically correct to write ' reduce pollution ' ? Or there is a more idiomatical way to express such an effort?
3. what's the difference between effort of doing sth. and effort to do sth. ?

thanks

slinson, you still have to tell us where this sentence is coming from, if you're going to post it here. (i'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you didn't write that sentence yourself, so please tell us where you got it.)

the short answer to your question is that you don't use "...of reducing" here because it's not logical. let me illustrate with a different example in which this sort of construction is correct:
the cost of building this wall is about $10,000.
--> this makes logical sense, because it is equivalent to saying "building this wall costs $10,000", which also makes sense.
the success of reducing... doesn't make logical sense, because it wouldn't make logical sense to write "reducing... was successful". (you'd instead have to write something like the effort to reduce ... was successful)