Which is correct?
Most major security breaches ____________ human error.
a. can be attributed to
b. are due to

Answer: b.

Explanation:
As a rule, it’s better to go with the less wordy option when phrases mean the same thing. There are those that claim “due to” is ungrammatical, but they are incorrect. Read on:

John McIntyre explains the likely source of the quarrel against “due to” — what he calls a sham rule and/or a crochet — in his Baltimore Sun article, The foggy, foggy “due”:

A reader who saw yesterday’s post on compared to/compared with writes to ask about due to/because of, on which a colleague is dogmatic.

I would hazard a guess that the Dogmatic Colleague is a fan of the late John Bremner’s Words on Words and its bracing certainties about language. Professor Bremner laid down the law on due to/because of: Due is an adjective, so the adjectival prepositional phrase due to must follow a form of to be so that due can refer back to a noun or pronoun. His defeat was due to carelessness is the Bremner example, with due referring back to defeat. Because of is an adverbial prepositional phrase, referring back not to a noun or pronoun but to a verb. He was defeated because of carelessness is the Bremner example of proper usage, because of referring back to defeated.”

McIntyre goes on to discredit the argument, quoting the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage:

“Due to is as impeccable grammatically as owing to, which is frequently recommended as a substitute for it. There never has been a grammatical ground for the objection, although the objection formulated in the early part of this [twentieth] century persists in the minds of some usage commentators.”

So there you have it. If you’ve got any dogmatic colleagues who insist that “due to” is unacceptable, you know where to send them — straight to John McIntyre, in whose honor I’m adding a new tag today: sham rules and crochets.

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Answer: 1.

Explanation:
“To reduce” is what is known as an infinitive. The old rule is that you don’t split infinitives, but even when that was the rule, there were exceptions. Quite often, refusing to split an infinitive results in an awkward sentence. Even worse, keeping your infinitives glued together can also make your meaning unclear.

In this case, if we place “gradually” at the end of the sentence, it makes it seem as if reducing the number of connections gradually is what reduces vulnerability. But the gradual nature of the reduction has nothing to do with the purpose — it’s just the manner in which the action is being performed. Sentence #1 is more apt to be understood properly: The government is reducing Internet connections to reduce vulnerability but will do so in a gradual manner.

Here’s Oxford Dictionaries on the (non-)issue of split infinitives:

What are split infinitives? 

What’s wrong with split infinitives?

You see? Sometimes infinitives should stick together; sometimes it’s better to split them up. Make the sensible choice and don’t let outdated rules trip you up. If your English teacher taught you otherwise … well, your English teacher was wrong.

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Answer: a.

Explanation:
Although among isn’t strictly wrong, between is the better choice when you’re referring to a choice involving distinct entities, even if there are more than two. There’s a common grammar myth that you can only use the word “among” in reference to three or more items. In fact — as is so often the case — reality is a little more complicated than that.

@GrammarGirl explains:
“Here’s the deal: you can use the word “between” when you are talking about distinct, individual items even if there are more than two of them. For example, you could say, “She chose between Harvard, Brown, and Yale” because the colleges are individual items.
Relationships
The Chicago Manual of Style describes these as one-to-one relationships. Sometimes they are between two items, groups, or people, as in these sentences:

Choose between Squiggly and Aardvark.
Let’s keep this between you and me.

Other times they can be between more than two items, groups, or people as in these sentences:

The negotiations between the cheerleaders, the dance squad, and the flag team were going well despite the confetti incident.
The differences between English, Chinese, and Arabic are significant.”

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