However much Americans may agree that the financing of elections with

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A - may agree that..... and that campaign... (Parallel). No other issues. Keep.
B,C,D - break parallelism. Out.
E - Changes the meaning from the degree of agreement, to americans do agree. Out.

Answer is A

Options B, C and D require 'that' at the end of the option i.e. 'agree to the fact that' or 'agree that' and can thus be eliminated. Between options A and E, E can be eliminated since the first part i.e. the underlined portion must show a contrast, which is not there in option E.

that campaign finance reform would produce better government
"That" is the clue.

Only A is appropriate here.

We need 'THAT' to introduce a new clause so B,C & D are out.
E can not be correct because we can not separate two ICs by just a comma.

left with A.

However much Americans may agree that the financing of elections with special interest money undermines democracy and that campaign finance reform would produce better government, it has been very difficult to push such measures through a Congress that has been elected using the old financing system.

A. However much Americans may agree that - correct - parallelism and contrast followed.
B. Despite agreement among Americans to the fact - parallelism not followed.
C. Although Americans agree - parallelism not followed.
D. Even though Americans may agree - parallelism not followed.
E. There is agreement among Americans that

The meaning that the sentence wants to convey is- Even though American citizens may agree to serve as jurors, the actual response rate does not reflect the same. For parallelism's sake, B, C and D do not make sense. Between A and E, A conveys the meaning well. The meaning gets lost in E. Hence, A.

However much American citizens may agree that they want to serve as jurors and that they would gladly give up other commitments to do so, courts report very low response rates from people called to jury duty.

(A) However much American citizens may agree that Correct. This uses the tradtional meaning of "however". I think there is a Magoosh article that explains this quite well. In this case we want to say something along the lines of "It doesn't matter how much American citizens may agree that XY". What is also important to note that this sentence uses "that", which is required after "agree".
(B) Despite the agreement among American citizens to the fact that This is grammatically correct, yet very wordy. Hence, is inferior to A.
(C) Although American citizens agree This probably looks like the best answer to a lot of people. The problem is, however, that is lacks a "that", which we need after "agree". In this case we can't omit this crucial word.
(D) Even though American citizens may agree Similar to C - lack of "that".
(E) There is agreement among American citizens that This is wrong because of the argument structure. The structure looks like this: Americans say that they want to serve a jurors, but they actually don't do it". We ned to show this disparity properly in order to get the meaning right.

I hope that helps

But using much for citizens is grammatically incorrect, so B is a better option

Hi use of much is correct here in the sentence it.
Take for example.

Ron ate the last slice of pizza much to the dissatisfaction of Rosy.

Here is it is implying degree of agreement.

My friend,
Please go through this thread https://gmatclub.com/forum/although-the ... 52069.html and read excellent explanation by KyleWiddison of Manhattan Prep. I am sure your doubts will be cleared by perusing that thread.

We need Parallelism ( and that.....) so only A and E remains. Out of A and E ,E is out because it fails to produce the contrast. So A remains.

Dear Expert and my other friends,

After reading the sentence, I understood that it was checking for parallelism and contrast. However, I would request you to confirm that can we use much with Americans as Americans are countable nouns and we use many with a countable noun,

Hello, RahulHGGmat. In the sentence at hand, much refers to the degree that a certain group of people agree on something, and agreement is not a countable noun.


Note that you could replace however much with to the extent that. There is no such thing as the extent of Americans, so we know we are quantifying something else.

I hope that helps clarify the matter. Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

Hello RahulHGGmat,

We hope this finds you well.

Having gone through the question and your query, we believe we can resolve your doubt.

Understanding the intended meaning is key to solving this question; the intended meaning of this sentence is that regardless of the degree to which Americans may agree that the financing of elections with special interest money undermines democracy and that campaign finance reform would produce better government, it has been very difficult to push such measures through a Congress that has been elected using the old financing system.

Here, the use of "much" is correct, since "much" refers to the verb phrase "Americans may agree" not to the noun "Americans"; as AndrewN has said, "much" refers to the degree of agreement among Americans, and "agreement" is not countable.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team