South Pacific Vacations has a package tour to Sydney, Australia, for $

Official Explanation


Step 1: Read the Original Sentence Carefully, Looking for Errors

Note that the sentence makes a list of items included in the package tour, so that list should be in parallel form. But each of the three items is in a different form: “Airfare,” “spending five nights,” and “to take a harbor cruise” are about as far from parallel as you can get. Expect the right answer to rectify this by making the other items parallel to “airfare,” since that’s the one item we can’t change.

Step 2: Scan and Group the Answer Choices

(A) and (B) don’t change the form of the second item in the list (“spending five nights”), while (C), (D), and (E) change it in various ways.

Step 3: Eliminate Choices Until Only One Remains

Since the noun “airfare,” the first item in the list, is not underlined, the other items in the list must be changed to agree with this form. The only choice that turns the second item, “spending five nights,” into a simple noun is (C). Each of the other choices fails to exhibit truly parallel structure and should be eliminated on that basis. As a side note, (C) also changes the conjunction “and” before “round-trip airfare” to a semicolon, which is preferable because this part of the sentence starts a new thought.