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This is a clone of SC # 91 from OG 13. See in-an-effort-to-reduce-their-inventories-italian-vintners-83910.html

Basically this comes down to proper ellipsis, the ability to leave off the verb in the second part of a sentence. For example:

"I have studied for the GMAT and you have [] too." - Here we can leave off the second "studied for the GMAT" because it is already understood.

In this question, B says "everything about the banquet is designed to impress, and it has". The intended meaning of this ellipsis is to omit the verb "impressed", making it "everything about the banquet is designed to impress, and it has [impressed]". Unfortunately, we cannot complete the ellipsis this way because [impressed] doesn't appear elsewhere in the sentence. The only grammatical ellipsis would could create is "everything about the banquet is designed to impress, and it has [designed to impress]", which improperly means that the banquet itself has done the designing.

C creates proper ellipsis because it says "everything about the banquet is designed to impress, and it does". In this case, the omitted verb is "impress", making it "everything about the banquet is designed to impress, and it does [impress]".


Alternatively, another way to look at this is through verb tense consistency. B starts in present simple form (meaning in general, or for all times) and then shifts to present perfect (meaning before, and potentially up till, now). It's perfectly fine to shift tenses, but there needs to be a reason to do so - a time modifier such as "until now". We don't have that in B, so we shouldn't change tenses. A, D, and E all have similar issues.

C doesn't have this problem, because C starts in present simple and ends in present simple. No time modifiers necessitate a change, so don't change tenses, especially since it matches the meaning, that the banquet is designed to impress (a general characteristic about the banquet) and it does impress (another general characteristic about the banquet).