Bunuel wrote:
The school budget proposal
including funds for a new gym, a larger auditorium, and three new school buses.
(A) including funds for a new gym, a
(B) included funds for a new gym, a
(C) included funds for a new gym,
(D) includes funds for a new gym, also a
(E) includes funds for a new gym, for a
VERITAS PREP OFFICIAL SOLUTION:
Whenever you see a list of items - as you do here with "a new gym, a larger auditorium, and three school buses" - you should check to ensure that all items are in parallel form.
Three answer choices in this problem break parallel structure. Note that all four choices include "a new gym" and you're stuck with the non-underlined "three school buses," meaning that in order to be parallel you need a quantifier in front of the second item to match "a" and "three." (C) does not have a quantifier, so it is incorrect.
Also note that the last item does not have a preposition. The word "for" after "funding" serves as the connector between each item and "funding." So choices (D) and (E) are incorrect, as they break parallelism with only 2 of the 3 items getting individual prepositions.
Choice (A) is incorrect for a different reason: while either "includes" or "included" would work as the verb in this sentence (there is no indication as to whether this budget happened previously or currently, so neither verb is illogical), "including" is used as a modifier, leaving the sentence without a subject-verb pairing. This is an incomplete sentence and therefore incorrect.
Only answer choice (B) uses proper parallelism in a complete sentence, so (B) is correct.