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The factory was dismantled to 70% of its original mass.

Is it grammatically correct to say "dismantled to 70%"? I am asking because I have never heard of something like that being phrased like this, and it seems a bit of an awkward phrasing. The "to 75%" might be wrong.

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  • It's not so much a matter of it being grammatically correct - the problem here is one of semantics (meaning). So I'd just say your attempted phrasing is non-idiomatic (it's not something any native speaker would be likely to say). You might do better with 30% of the mass of the factory was dismantled, but even then I think it's rather strange to refer to the extent of the dismantling of a factory in terms of how much mass was "lost".
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jun 3, 2019 at 17:32

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Not ungrammatical, but certainly awkward and non-idiomatic.

For a start, talking about how much "mass" of the factory remained is a strange way to measure a factory. If someone asked me how big a factory was, I might say "It covers an area of 1000m²" or I might say "30 people work there". I would not say "It has a mass of 100000 tonnes"

Then I would probably talk about the percentage that was removed, rather than the percentage that remained. So I'd say

30% of the factory was dismantled.

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