Although the ballet company received many more donations this year tha

Official Explanation

Read the Original Sentence Carefully, Looking for Errors:

When the underlined portion of the sentence contains a pronoun, check to make sure the pronoun agrees in number with the noun it refers to. Here, the plural pronouns "they" and "their" refer to "the ballet company." Since the sentence is only talking about one ballet company, singular pronouns should have been used. "It" and "its" should have been used instead of "they" and "their."

Scan and Group the Answer Choices:

(A), (B), (D), and (E) all use plural pronouns to refer back to the ballet company! (C) eliminates the pronoun entirely. Check this answer choice to make sure nothing has been overlooked.

Eliminate Wrong Answer Choices:

Since all the choices except (C) incorrectly use a plural pronoun to refer to the singular noun "ballet company," eliminate them and double-check (C).

(C) gets rid of the pronoun altogether, and it creates a simple comparison. The sentence now reads, “more … this year than in any past season.” There's no grammatical error here, so (C) is correct.

TAKEAWAY: Knowing the commonly tested errors, such as pronouns, and the rules connected with those errors really pays off. In this case, once the error was spotted, a quick sweep of the choices knocked out all four wrong ones!