Multi-national corporations that have tried to compete in China have

Hi Folks,

Here comes the official explanation for this question:

Multi-national corporations that have tried to compete in China have faced intense competition from local firms that have been able to infringe their designs because of the limited patent laws.

Meaning Analysis
• Those MNCs that have tried to compete in China, have faced immense competition from local companies.
• These local companies have been able to steal the design of these MNCs.
• The reason for this stealing is that the patent laws in the country are very limited.

Errors in Original Sentence
• Clause 1: Multi-national corporations
• Clause 2: that have tried to compete in China
• Cont. of Cl 1: have faced intense competition from local firms
• Clause 3: that have been able to infringe their designs
• Cont. of Cl 2: because of the limited patent laws.

1. All the subject-verb pairs are accounted for.
2. All the verbs are correctly written in present perfect tense, indicating an action that took place in the past but whose effect is still continuing into the present.
3. All the modifiers are correctly placed.
4. Grammatically, there is no error in the sentence. However, the reference of pronoun “their” is a little concern here. Logically it should refer to “MNCs”. And it would actually not make sense to say that local firms have been able to infringe their own designs (i.e. if “their” referred to “local firms”). Even though logically “their” should refer to “MNCs” only, we will not directly mark choice A as the correct answer. We will put it on hold and do the PoE to see if we have any better answer choice than A that further clarifies this possible pronoun ambiguity.

PoE:

A. that have been able to infringe their designs: On hold for the reason stated above.

B. because the infringement of multi-national corporations’ designs was enabled: Incorrect.
Error – In this choice, the active voice of clause 3 verb has been turned to passive voice. Now this choice does not say that the local firms in China have been able to infringe the designs, a vital information missing from this choice.

C. in that their designs were enabled to be infringed: Incorrect.
Error 1 – This choice repeats the same error of missing information because of passive construction.
Error 2 – Past tense verb “were enabled” is not consistent with present perfect tense verbs in the sentence.

D. because the designs were enabled and infringed: Incorrect.
Error – This choice repeats both the errors of Choice C.

E. that have been able to infringe the designs of these multi-national corporations: Correct.
In this choice “their” has been replaced by “of these multi-national corporations”. This clears the reference of “their” in choice A. So we choose E over A.

Takeaways
1. The correct answer choice must contain all the information presented in the original sentence.
2. All the verbs in the sentence must be consistent.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.