In an eleventh-hour compromise, Senate aides and White House staffers

Dear SajjadAhmad,

I'm happy to respond.

This is an embarrassingly bad question. BTW, the "A" in choices (C) & (D) should not be capitalized, because they don't begin the sentence. I don't know whether you miscopied this from the book or this was a mistake in the original.

A. Senate aides and White House staffers reached a deal on a controversial spending bill that
Looks good.

B. Senate aides and White House staffers had reached a deal on a controversial spending bill which
Really? This is an extremely uncreative wrong answer: it is almost identical to (A), but the author swapped in an incorrect verb tense and substituted "which" for "that." This is a stock wrong answer, not the kind of intelligent distractor that the official GMA would have.

C. A deal was reached by Senate aides and White House staffers for a controversial spending bill which
The word "for" is idiomatically incorrect. This is almost identical to (D), another stock wrong answer, with an incorrect idiom swapped in.

D. A deal was reached with Senate aides and White House staffers on a spending bill that was controversial and
A textbook example of how the passive often makes a sentence weak, indirect, and ineffective. This is obviously and over-the-top wrong. Of course, it's almost humorous that they felt they had to make (C) even more wrong!

E. Senate aides and White House staffers reaching a deal on a controversial spending bill
Finally, the famous missing-verb mistake!

Thus, (A) is the only possible answer. This is an extremely easy question, and I am astonished by the dearth of creative thinking in its formulation. It's an extremely formulaic question, as if someone were following some kind of set of regular rules for SC creation. In fact, there are no obvious patterns among the wrong answers on the GMAT SC.

Here's a more challenging SC practice question:
The term "Immaculate Conception"

Does all this make sense?
Mike