To meet the rapidly rising market demand for fish and seafood, supplie

10 seconds sol
grow is verb . growth or growing is noun prefer VERB so ABC are out
, with is always flawed so D is right

Be careful, NarayanaGupta007. Your 10-second approach may have worked on this question, but this comma + with claim is inaccurate. All of the following OG questions employ such a construct in the correct answer:

1) About 5 million...
2) During the early...
3) The diet of...
4) The intricate structure...
5) The tourism commission...
6) Visitors to the...

I point this out because an approach that is too simple—e.g., marking off any answer choice that contains being—can cause a person to go into autopilot and not really engage with the question, then miss it. Sure, you should be wary of a comma + with construct, since it does often appear in incorrect answers, but you should also know how it can be used correctly. (You never know what will show up on the screen on test day.)

Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

Hi guys, I know experts are saying "growing them naturally" don't make sense, and it doesn't I fully agree. From a grammatical POV, growing them naturally needs a subject. Who's growing?

But I just feel the question is kinda funny, I got it wrong on the first try because I've actually seen fishermen just circle a region of the sea with net, and let the fish grow naturally...which I guess could be "growing them naturally"? The "unnatural" way of growing would be the way stated in the question - cutting the feed by half and using a special purpose-made diet. So with that provided in the question, I immediately had the image in my mind how the fishermen "grew the fishes naturally" by catching them and dumping them in oceanwater closed off/separated into square lots by fishnets.

To meet the rapidly rising market demand for fish and seafood, suppliers are growing fish twice as fast as their natural growth rate, cutting their feed allotment by nearly half and raising them on special diets.

Meaning clarity -
We can say, "John walks twice as fast as Sam walks" - we are comparing actions.
Likewise, the sentence's meaning is "Suppliers are growing fish twice as fast as they grow naturally." They here refer to "fish." We are comparing how suppliers are growing fish with how Fish grow naturally. How are suppliers achieving it?
By two adverbial modifiers
1. cutting their feed allotment... (their logically goes to fish)
2. raising them on special diets...(them logically goes to fish)

Now, with this understanding -

(A) their natural growth rate, cutting their feed allotment - As Krishna also pointed out, the below two sentences using ellipses don't make sense
1. Suppliers are growing the fish twice as fast as "suppliers are growing" their natural growth rate. or
2. Suppliers are growing the fish twice as fast as their natural growth rate "are growing fish."

So a logical deduction is - Suppliers are growing fish twice as fast as they grow naturally." They here refer to "fish." We are comparing how suppliers are growing fish with how Fish grow naturally.

(B) their natural growth rate, their feed allotment cut - This one has not only a problem as described in A but also an additional problem of wrong modifier structure. "And" demands an adverbial modifier parallel to "raising them on special diets."

(C) growing them naturally, cutting their feed allotment - Who is growing them? Supplier? No. It says naturally. So how can suppliers grow then when they grow naturally? Moreover, here, on one side of the comparison, twice as fast as we have a clause, and on the other side, we have an ING verbal. Not parallel. Wrong.

(D) they grow naturally, cutting their feed allotment - perfect.

(E) they grow naturally, with their feed allotment - while the first part is correct. The modifier is not correct. "And" demands an adverbial modifier parallel to "raising them on special diets."