SC - federal law

A bit tricky but I'll try to break it down.

For starters, the sentence is telling us that there is a federal law and (there is) a provincial law that are each valid and consistent.

There is a federal law AND (There is) a provincial law. The ‘AND’ is combining two clauses and the expletive construction takes on a singular verb as the second expletive construction is implied since it comes after a conjunction. It is NOT of the form ‘There are (a federal law and a provincial law)’ but of the form mentioned at the start.

However, the relative pronoun ‘THAT’ stands for (the federal law and the provincial law). Hence it will be followed by a plural verb.

That's why we can eliminate B, C and E.

The use of 'both of which are each' in Answer choice D is awkward.

Answer is A

Great explanation Legend. +1

I came to A as the answer when I tried to think of another sentence using the same concepts that sounded more familiar to me. I came up with this sentence that helped me realize that A is correct. It's a funny sentence, but it helped me.

In New York there is a blue dot and a red dot that are each on a sign. That helped me see the sentence contains 2 items that are each singluar and therefore, the verb should be singular.

The reason "are" is correct in the second part of the sentence is because the sentence is referring to the 2 items collectively. When refer to 2 individual items collectively, it is plural and therefore "are" is correct.

Alternative sentence:

"A tree and a flower are what the teacher instructed us to paint."

OA is B

can someone pls throw some more light on the usage of "are" and "is" in the context of this sentence .. it will help ....

Nope, I can't shed any light on that. I think the answer is A for the reasons I posted above. Where did you get this question? Some sources are better than others due to mistakes in the answers.

I really find it hard to believe that the answer is B. I'm disappointed now .

I guess that's the reason why I normally only do questions from official GMAT questions. ie. OG, GMAT Prep, Sets, 1000 SCs. No other testmaker's questions come close to the quality of those developed by ACT or ETS.