Official Solution:The proliferation of so-called cybersquatters, people who register the Internet domain names of high-profile companies in hopes of reselling the rights to those names for a profit, led to passing the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act in 1999, allowing companies to seek up to $100000 in damages against those who register domain names with the sole intent of selling them later. A. passing the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act in 1999, allowing companies to seek up to $100000 in damages against those who register domain names with the sole intent of selling
B. the passage of the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act in 1999, which allows companies to seek up to $100000 in damages against those who register domain names with the sole intent that they will sell
C. the passage in 1999 of the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which allows companies to seek up to $100000 in damages against those who register domain names with the sole intent of selling
D. the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which was passed in 1999, and it allows companies to seek up to $100000 in the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which was passed in 1999, and it allows companies to seek up to $100000 in damages against those who register domain names with the sole intent to sell
E. the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, passed in 1999 and allowed companies to seek up to $100000 in damages against those who register domain names with the sole intent of selling
It would be convenient to keep the basic structure and meaning of the sentence in view while explaining the solution:
The proliferation led to the passage of an act, which allows companies to seek damages against people with sole intent of selling. A. Use of the verb form present participle “passing” is wrong. The verb “led to” should be followed by a concrete noun (“passage”) or at least a verb form such as a gerund (“the passing of…”), which can act as a noun. Use of a verb form such as present participle (“passing”) is incorrect, because such verb forms are used as adjectives or adverbs, but not nouns.
B. The relative clause modifier “ which….” should ideally touch the noun it modifies. Therefore it is desirable that this modifier touches the noun phrase “Consumer Protection Act” rather than “1999”.
Moreover the usage “intent that they sell” is unidiomatic. “Intent of selling” is more concise and idiomatic.
C. Correct. The noun “passage” has been used correctly after “led to”. The modifier “ which” touches the modified noun phrase “Consumer Protection Act”.
D. The simplified structure of the sentence is as follows:
The proliferation led to the passage of the Consumer Protection Act, and it allows companies to …… The pronoun “it” is the subject of the independent clause “it allows companies to….”. Therefore by virtue of parallelism it refers to the subject of the other independent clause in the sentence “The proliferation led to…”, i.e. “it” wrongly refers to “proliferation”, whereas it should refer to “Consumer Protection Act”.v E. The simplified structure of the sentence is as follows:
The proliferation led to the passage of the Consumer Protection Act and allowed companies to... The above structure implies that the main subject “proliferation” has two verbs in parallel: “led to” and “allowed”. Thus the sentence wrongly implies that the proliferation allowed companies to seek damages.
Answer: C
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