The prospect of a new wave of automobile imports has prompted domestic

Question

The prospect of a new wave of automobile imports has prompted domestic manufacturers to  reduce staff, close plants, and offering buyers financial incentives so they  stay competitive.

(A) reduce staff, close plants, and offering buyers financial incentives so they
(B) reduce staff, close plants, and offer financial incentives to buyers in order to
(C) reducing staff, closing plants, and the offer of financial incentives to buyers so they can
(D) staff reductions, closing plants, and offering buyers financial incentives in order to
(E) a reduction of staff, plant closings, and offering financial incentives to buyers to

daagh · Answer

Ans is B for using a parallel list of infinitives such as 'to reduce staff', close pants' and offer incentives. In all other choices, the list parallelism has gone haywire and some of them have plausible pronoun ambiguity too.

gvij2017 · Answer

Parallelism error in given statement is corrected by choice B.
reduce, close, and offer.

B is correct.

sampriya · Answer

The prospect of a new wave of automobile imports has prompted domestic manufacturers   to reduce staff, close plants, and offering buyers   financial incentives so they stay competitive.

the parallel elements are as highlighted in green above

offering buyers should be made parallel to "reduce staff" and " close plants"
offering should be "offer buyers"

the non parallel elements are highlighted in red below:

(A) reduce staff, close plants, and  offering buyers  financial incentives so they
(B) reduce staff, close plants, and offer financial incentives to buyers in order to
(C)  reducing staff,   closing plants , and  the  offer of financial incentives to buyers so they can
(D)  staff reductions , closing plants, and offering buyers financial incentives in order to
(E)  a reduction of staff ,  plant closings , and  offering  financial incentives to buyers to

only option B is free of any errors!!

CrackverbalGMAT · Answer

The underlined portion of this sentence comprises  3 items which together form a list .

Whenever you see a list, it is advisable to look for   parallelism  errors to begin with. 
This is the quickest way to eliminate options to arrive at the best option.

Where do we begin?  Let’s look at the words right before the underlined portion –  prompted domestic manufactures to …  
This means that the verbs in the list that follow have to agree with this structure and form and should be parallel to the other items in the list.

What are the three verbs here?  
Reduce, close, offer! If they had be considered parallel, they should all be in the infinitive forms to follow the structure of the sentence. 
Therefore the right option should have ‘to reduce’, ‘close’ and ‘offer’.

With this knowledge, you can now scan the options.
 Only Option B  has this kind of parallelism. 
 Eliminate Options A, C, D and E . ( A, C, D, and E don’t maintain parallelism, C has an ambiguous pronoun )

Option B  is the best option.

Hope this helps!

VerbalBot · Answer

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The prospect of a new wave of automobile imports has prompted domestic

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The prospect of a new wave of automobile imports has prompted domestic

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