Created in 1945 to reduce poverty and stabilize foreign currency

I tend to get a lot of questions about dashes, and that’s part of why we chose this question for a QOTD. In general, I don’t think you need to waste much time worrying about them: I’ve never seen an official GMAT question in which the presence or absence of a dash was a deciding factor. (For more on dashes and colons and other punctuation on the GMAT, check out this video.)

And in this particular sentence, the dashes aren’t doing anything terribly interesting. They’re just separating a modifier from the rest of the sentence. So we’ll focus on more interesting stuff.


I don’t see any problems here at all. “Their” jumps out at me, but it seems to refer to the two organizations, so that’s perfectly OK. Let’s keep (A).


For starters, there are some unnecessary extra words in the beginning of the underlined portion: why say “struggled as they try to meet the expectations” when we could just say “struggled to meet the expectations”?

The bigger problem is the singular pronoun “that” at the end of the underlined portion. The trouble is, I don’t really see any singular nouns “that” could possibly refer to. Logically, “that” should refer to “the needs” (which is not stated anywhere in the sentence) or maybe “the expectations”, but those are both plural, anyway.

So we can eliminate (B).


The first part of the underlined portion looks fine, but we still have exactly the same problem with the singular pronoun “that” at the end of the underlined section. “That” is singular, and there are no logical singular referents.

So we can eliminate (C), too.


Once again, the singular pronoun “that” has no logical referent. See the explanation for (B) for more on that issue.

The first part of the underlined section also has some problems. There’s really no reason to say that the organizations “had to struggle continually in trying to meet the expectations” when we could just say “continually struggled to meet the expectations”, as in (A).

So we have plenty of reasons to get rid of (D).


We still have some wasted words at the beginning of the underlined portion: “struggled continually in trying to meet… expectations” is a lousy substitute for the version in (A), which just says “continually struggled to meet expectations.”

There’s also a parallelism problem after the dashes in (E). The parallelism trigger “and” is followed by the participle “neglecting” – and nothing could possibly be parallel to “neglecting” here. It makes much more sense to use a nice, normal verb form (“neglected”) that can be parallel to “struggled.”

So (E) can be eliminated, and we’re left with (A).