Bunuel wrote:
The lottery paid the winner $100,000 after taxes, enabling her to pay off the rest of her mortgage and become debt-free.
A. enabling her to pay off
B. for her to pay off
C. for the paying of
D. that enabled them to pay off
E. that she could pay off
Official ExplanationSince the underlined portion (and hence the answer choice) is very short, a quick vertical scan reveals a lot. (B), (C) and (E) imply that the lottery gave her the money because the lottery intended that she use it to pay off her mortgage. This is false; the lottery gave her the money simply because she won it. Also, (E) is not grammatically correct; it would require "so that", not just "that". But note that, even if (E) contained "so that", it would still be incorrect because of the logic explained earlier in this paragraph. So we eliminate (B), (C) and (E). That leaves choices (A) and (D).
Choice (D) improperly seems to imply (if we assume that the antecedent of "them" is "lottery") that the lottery paid off the winner's mortgage. This is incorrect; the original sentence clearly states that the lottery paid the money directly to the winner, and that this money enabled her to pay off her mortgage. Thus, (D) is incorrect. A closer look also shows that the pronoun "them" has no proper antecedent here, since the sentence contains no plural nouns. The word "lottery" is singular, so (D) cannot be correct even if we disregard the change in meaning.
That leaves us with (A), the correct answer.