Knowledge International says its new scheme will support federal objec

I'd Go for B with this - As per the intent the sentence has to be in present tense . and B is the only choice which does that well .

I agree with you on the use of older.
But E does maintain parallelism because the subject is knowledge international and agrees with the word "encourages ".Isnt "would reserved for hypothetic events.

yes - one use of "would" is for hypos --- this is a hypo --- the "new scheme" is going to do something, so it is unreal in that sense

in E there is no comma before "and" - you need a comma before an "and" if it is joining two separate clauses.

What abt D?
Nones commenting on "investment/investments to verb/in verbing

"Investment" can be used that way... investment to meet... needs seems fine to me

The broad agenda for the Prime Minister's emergency meeting was related to foreign investment in the country.

You don't have to say foreign "investments" though it is pretty unlikely that it will just be one 'investment'

to verb is an adverbial modifier and needs a verb to modify.In D and E the only verb is support

so what is your conclusion? support X.... to meet Y is a valid formulation. Just googled and found this on a Canadian government website:

We therefore recommend that dedicated funding be made available to support organizations to meet AODA compliance standards.

To meet economy's needs is an infinitive and modifies a verb."to support" modifies made available and to meet modifies to support.
I think Dand E are wrong because of misplaced modifier also.Need expert to corroborate

what is OA? I am chose ans:D...it was between D/E. E throws this older people statement into the sentence.
does investments need to be plural or singular?

I also think it is D, but i am not sure about the use of needs.

Can you clarify one two points

1) why B is wrong here

B. can support federal objectives regarding the investments in meeting economy's future needs, and encourage older students for participation.

2) In the option b, do we require to repeat to be - can after comma and 'and' conjunction or can we take placement of 'can' implied before the verb encourage ? because if the repition is necessary then the same sentence has two different tenses within

B is not correct on multiple counts:

1. B uses encourage. We can interpret this in two ways:

a. …its new scheme will support X and (its new scheme) encourage Y. This is not correct construction, since you would expect the verb to be encourages (since scheme is singular).

b. …its new scheme can support X and (can) encourage Y. The issue here is more of logic. When Knowledge International (or anyone else for that matter) says something about its (own) scheme, can comes out as too in-definitive and non-committal a statement (think about it: Fed says its measures can improve US economy).

2. Changes the meaning of the original sentence, since older is not the same as mature.

p.s. I would strongly encourage test takers to not interpret would as hypothetical usage. For example, I will become a pilot is a correct usage, though at this point of time, it is still hypothetical (whether I finally end up becoming a pilot or not).

The best way to interpret would is when one talks about future from past perspective. In this case, Knowledge International said in the past (sentence, due to its typical construction, uses says, but this act of saying clearly occurred sometime in the past) something about future (that its scheme in future will do X and Y). Hence, would is the most appropriate usage here.

Hey guys,

Thank you for the invitation to chime in! I'll throw my support for choice D here, as well. A few big-picture problems with some of the choices include:

-The use of "encouraged" in A and C - this "new scheme" doesn't call for a past-tense verb. At its most retroactive, you'd use the present perfect "has encouraged" to indicate that it's still ongoing, but a straight past-tense verb isn't correct here.

-"investments in meeting" or "investments for meeting" in choices A, B, and C are poorly phrased - that present-tense verb isn't really anything you can invest in, so in order to use a verb you really need to use the "to meet" infinitive form.

-"could" and "can" (E and B) aren't really good uses of business writing. As far as meaning goes, they're not something that a company like Knowledge Int'l would ever make an official statement on. "Will" and "Would" are better - they predict that something will happen instead of saying "maybe" or "it might". It's a subtle thing but I've seen the "nobody knows" forms of "can", "could", "maybe" come up and in contexts like these I haven't ever seen them be correct.

-Between D and E, E isn't really a pure parallelism error, as you could reverse the two verbs and it would be okay: "the program encourages older students and could support federal objectives". In that case, one thing is definitely true ("encourages") and the other is potentially true ("could support"), so the meaning is correct. But in the reverse order, as E is written, the conditional comes first making an awkward meaning "could support...and encourages" - the "could" really should control both verbs, and in this case that makes the second half illogical (you can't have "could" with an indicative form like "encourages").

I hope that helps...

One other point - I don't think that the GMAT would use "mature" vs. "older" in an official question as this question does...that seems to be a word-choice smokescreen that I haven't really seen them do. And 'investments" vs. "investment" - they're two different meanings but I think that both are appropriate here. "Investments" refers to specific levels or quantities of investments (e.g. "the government wants investments totaling $500 million"), whereas "investment" is the overall entity or idea. I don't think either is particularly wrong or right here.

it is d and in b the idiom encourage for is wrong

I have a question here, if in the option A if the answer choice did not make the parallelism error and did have will support...and [will] encourage.. would it then be correct?

In case yes, then what makes us select would/will or the vice versa?

Can anybody tell me when to use "could" and when to use "would" with examples ? It's really confusing me
Thanks in advance.

Hi GMATNinja, GMATNinjaTwo, aragonn, sudarshan22, generis, hazelnut, Vyshak Bunuel

Could you please add OA to the question and also provide answer for below question if possible as I also get confused sometime between would, could and should.