The nation's three military academies have seen a dramatic rise in app

Hey All,

Have no fear! There's no need for an official answer when you have sentence correction certainty on your side! VERY IMPORTANT: I read through the thread here, and people are focusing on issues that really aren't important. All joking aside, go out and get the MGMAT book (or any company's book) and learn to focus purely on objective categories.

784. The nation’s three military academies have seen a dramatic rise in applications, one fueled by a resurgence of patriotism, increasing tuition costs at private colleges, and improved recruiting by the academies.

This question is all about the parallelism category, because each answer choice is made up of a list. As a reminder, the way we i.d. parallelism issues is with lists (generally using conjunctions and/or commas). We fix them by isolating the individual elements in the list and making sure they match up structurally and logically. Let's try it.

(A) one fueled by a resurgence of patriotism, increasing tuition costs at private colleges, and improved recruiting by the academies
ANSWER: Everything is super parallel here, though it may not look it. "A resurgence" is a noun. "Increasing tuition costs..." is a noun (the increasing part is just a present participle, which is basically an adjective), and "improved recruiting..." is a noun (the "improved" is just a past participle, which is an adjective again).

(B) one fueled by a resurgence of patriotism, tuition costs that have increased at private colleges, and academies improving their recruiting
PROBLEM: The second item in this list is a full clause (it has a verb: "have increased"). This is not parallel to "a resurgence", which is a noun. It's also a meaning issue. It's not the costs themselves that have fueled the rise in applications, but the FACT that the costs have risen. The third item here is also terrible for parallelism.

(C) one fueled by a resurgence of patriotism, private colleges that increased their tuition costs, and recruiting improvements by the academies
PROBLEM: Again, the second item is a full clause. Also again, the meaning has changed. It's not the private colleges that have fueled the rise, but the FACT that the costs have gone up. The third item here is fine.

(D) fueled by a resurgence of patriotism, tuition costs increasing at private colleges, and academies improving their recruiting
PROBLEM: Notice how moving the "increasing" AFTER "tuition costs" makes it seem like more of a verb? Well that's exactly the problem in both of the second two items here. "A resurgence" is a straight up noun. If we wanted parallelism, we would need that to change to "patriotism resurging".

(E) fueled by a resurgence of patriotism, increasing tuition costs at private colleges, and academies improving their recruiting
PROBLEM: This time it's just the third item in the list that blows it. But it's still enough.

Hope that helps!

-tommy