Comparison Question

1. Understanding the meaning of the sentence :
The sentence compares the number of books published per capita (or per person) by Icelanders with the number of books published per capita in any other country.

2. Spot the errors in sentence:
We have a noun pharse " An exceptionally literate people " . This is a noun phrase and also a modifier. There is no error in the modifier of the original sentence, but we are only identifying it as it might be handy to eliminate some choices as we see later.

"An exceptionally literate people, more Icelanders publish books per capita than do the people of any other nation."
Number of Icelanders (as indicated by the expression - more Icelanders) is being compared to the action of people of other nations (as indicated by the expression – than do people of any other nation).
Two entities being compared should be grammatically and logically parallel.
Per the intended meaning of the sentence (note that we inferred the meaning of the sentence in meaning analysis above: we need to compare the number of books published per capita by Icelanders with the number of books published per capita by any other nation. Hence we can immediately eliminate option A based on this error analysis.

3. Process of elimination.

A. more Icelanders publish books per capita than do the people of
Based on Error Analysis we did above in step 2, we can eliminate A.[/u][/b]

B. more Icelandic books are published by Icelanders per capita than by the people of
Distorsts the meaning . It indicates that icelandic books are published by people of other nations as well. So B is eliminated.

C. Icelanders publish more books per capita than do the people of
Here the comparison is clear - compares number of books published per capita.. Parallelism in Comparison is maintained . The phrase "An exceptionally literate people" righly modifies the noun Icelanders and placed close to it. Hence Modifier is correctly expressed. Keep it aside.

D. Iceland’s per capita publication of books is higher than that by
The phrase "An exceptionally literate people" ( or any other modifier ) cannot modify a possessive noun. Also “that” refers to Iceland’s per capita publication of books. This leads to illogical comparison..So D is eliminated.

E. the per capita publication of Icelandic books is higher than that in
Not correct – see this choice has multiple errors.
1: modifier error – modifier “an exceptionally literate people” modifies per capita publication. This is incorrect.
2: comparison – it makes the following comparison
Per capita publication of Icelandic books is higher than (that) the per capita publication of Icelandic books in other nations.
This is not a valid and logical comparison. . So E is eliminated.

IMHO C is the Right Answer. A special Thanks to Payal of E-gmat, who corrected my reasoning for the wrong choices. So nice of her, and I updated my explanations of wrong choices to reflect the changes she suggested.