Mideast immigrants rates of entrepreneurship exceed virtually every ot

I irrationally sort of love this question as an example of how the GMAT deals with comparisons (more on comparisons in this video and this sequel), so here's a QOTD-style explanation:


The most important thing on GMAT comparison questions is to be maniacally literal. In this case, "Mideast immigrants' rates of entrepreneurship" is being compared to "virtually every other immigrant group." And it makes no sense to compare the rates of entrepreneurship to the immigrant groups themselves.

So (A) is out.


(B) has a similar problem as (A): "Mideast immigrants are exhibiting rates of entrepreneurship exceeding virtually every other immigrant group." And once again, it doesn't make sense to compare "rates of entrepreneurship" to immigrant groups.

Also, there's no good reason to use the progressive verb tense "are exhibiting" when we could just use a nice, simple present tense ("exhibit"). It's not WRONG, exactly, to say "are exhibiting", but that particular verb tense emphasizes that there's an ongoing action, and we really don't need to do that here.

So (B) is gone.


The pronoun "those" has to refer to a plural noun, and "rates of entrepreneurship" is the nearest candidate. So that gives us: "Immigrants from the Mideast exhibit rates of entrepreneurship exceeding [the rates of entrepreneurship] of virtually every other immigrant group..." That's perfect! Now we're comparing entrepreneurship rates of one immigrant group to entrepreneurship rates of other groups. Nice.

So let's keep (C).


(D) has all sorts of problems. First, it makes no sense to say that the rate of entrepreneurship is in immigrants. That's pretty ridiculous.

Second, we still have the same comparison problem as in (A) and (B): "The rates of entrepreneurship... exceed virtually every other immigrant group..." Again, it doesn't make sense to compare "rates of entrepreneurship" to immigrant groups.

So (D) is gone.


In theory, I like the use of "those" as a pronoun in (E). In practice, it doesn't quite work. "Those" seems to refer to just "rates", and that gives us: "The rates of Mideast immigrants' entrepreneurship exceeds [the rates] of virtually every other immigrant group..." That's much less clear than the version in (C), which tells us that "immigrants from the Mideast exhibit rates of entrepreneurship exceeding [the rates of entrepreneurship] of virtually every other immigrant group..."

You could also argue that the possessive construction is less than ideal in (E). There's no good reason to write "the rates of immigrants' entrepreneurship" when (C) has a better, clearer way to say the same thing.

And best of all, there's a nice, clear subject-verb error in (E): "the rates [of... entrepreneurship] exceeds." That's a killer.

So (C) is our winner.