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A. while it then proved unable to handle the increase in business, falling months behind in its payment to
I see two problems with (A). For starters, I can’t quite understand why “payment” is singular. If the health care company is “months behind”, wouldn’t that suggest that there are multiple payments – like, monthly payments, at the very least?
Second, I don’t think the conjunction “while” quite works here. “While” could mean either “at the same time as” or “although.” (Fun fact: until very recently, some grammar geeks insisted that “while” could NOT be used as a synonym for “although,” even though that usage has been a common part of spoken English for decades. Some grammar geeks need better things to worry about, I guess?)
This is really subtle, but it makes more sense to draw a sharp contrast using “but” instead of “although.” “Although” is a gentle qualifier that doesn’t invalidate the previous phrase; “but” is more direct, and suggests that the health care company’s status might be in doubt.
And even if you don't believe a word I said in the last two paragraphs, the singular “payment” is illogical enough to disqualify (A).
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B. while it then proved unable to handle the increase in business and fell months behind in its payment to
(B) has the same two problems as (A): “while” is suspect, and the singular “payment” is completely illogical. See above for more on those.
There’s also a subtle parallelism issue in (B). Consider two versions of the sentence:
- #1: “it then proved unable to handle the increase in business and fell months behind in its payments…”
- #2: “it then proved unable to handle the increase in business, falling months behind in its payments…”
Grammatically, both are fine. It’s just that in #1, the two verbs are parallel to each other, meaning that they’re “equally weighted” in some sense: the company did two things, and those two things do not necessarily depend on one another. In #2, “falling” is now a modifier, so it gives more information about the previous clause, “it then proved unable to handle the increase in business.”
And in this case, #2 – with “falling” as a modifier – makes much more sense in terms of meaning. The fact that the company fell behind in its payments helps us to understand how the company “proved unable to handle the increase in business.”
So we have plenty of reasons to eliminate (B), including the fact that we’re better off with “falling” as a modifier than as a verb.
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C. but then it proved unable to handle the increase in business, falling months behind in its paying
(C) looks pretty good: “falling” is now a modifier (see part (B) above for more on that), and “payment” is no longer singular. But there’s a new problem: it doesn’t really make sense to use the possessive “its” in front of “paying.” In most cases, there’s no good reason why you would ever stick a possessive pronoun in front of an "-ing" word (for jargon fans: these are participles or gerunds, depending on the usage).
If you wanted to be conservative, you could hang onto (C), but we’ll have a better option below.
Let’s line (D) and (E) up side-by-side, since they’re so similar:
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D. but then proving unable to handle the increase in business, falling months behind in paying
E. but then proved unable to handle the increase in business, falling months behind in paying
There’s only one difference between these two answer choices: the form of the word “to prove.” (D) gives us an “-ing” modifier (“proving”), and (E) gives us a simple past tense verb (“proved”).
(E) makes much more sense: “… the company became… but then proved unable…” Great, that’s nice and parallel, and it makes perfect sense to contrast two past tense verb phrases with each other. In (D), we have “… the company became one of the largest health care providers in the area, but then proving unable…” -- and I just can’t think of a good reason to use the conjunction “but” in front of an “-ing” modifier.
Given the choice between those last two options, (E) is clearly the best we can do.
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