The economy’s ability to generate and support new businesses — agents

VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL EXPLANATION:

This problem can be attacked fairly quickly, as the two decision points are easy to find and assess: the subject-verb agreement choice of “appear” vs. “appears” at the start of each choice and the different choices of structure in the “not only, but also” construction. Start with the subject-verb agreement choice: the subject of the sentence the singular “the ability” but be careful as there are many plural nouns in the garbage afterwards that you need to remove with the slash-and-burn technique. Since “the ability…appear” is incorrect you can confidently eliminate (A), (B), and (C).

The only difference between the remaining two choices is the “but also in” in (D) vs. “but also” in (E). Since these constructions require strict parallelism between the parts following “not only” and “but also” you see that (D) is correct: “faltering not only IN these places, but also IN these places.” (E) lacks the necessary “in” in the second portion and is thus incorrect.