People in the north central region of the United States use

Question

People in the north central region of the United States use certain utterances that  distinguish their speech from  other regions.
 
(A) distinguish their speech from
(B) distinguishes their manner of speaking from
(C) distinguish their speech from that of
(D) distinguish the way they speak from
(E) distinguishes their speech from those of

OE:

The correct response is (C). The original sentence (A) makes an illogical comparison between speech and region. (C) corrects the problem in the original version by adding that of.

(B) and (D) each fail to correct the illogical comparison between speech and region. Also, (B) incorrectly uses the singular verb distinguishes instead of the plural form.

(E) corrects the illogical comparison. However, (E) incorrectly uses the singular verb distinguishes. The verb must agree with its plural subject utterances. (E) also incorrectly uses those instead of the correct relative pronoun that (to refer to the singular speech).

OA:

daagh · Answer

First thing, it should be utterances that  distinguish  and not  distinguishes . So let’s dump B and E. Secondly distinguish their speech from some other speech and not from any regions. So eliminate A and D. By POE, it is C then that makes the grade finally.

devashish · Answer

Idiomatic use of distinguish is 'Distinguish X from Y'

Only C and E use the Idiomatic form of 'Distinguish'. 
In E, verb (Distinguishes) does not agree in number with its Subject (utterances).

So correct answer - C

devashish · Answer

Aaah, there is already an Official explanation ... and it is much better than mine.

VeritasPrepBrian · Answer

@devashish - I like that you offered your own explanation even in addition to the OE. It's important that you're thinking of why something is right/wrong, and often putting it into your own words is more helpful than what is "officially" written. As a teacher, I learned a long time ago that I couldn't teach nearly as well from the official explanations in the OG as I could from my own thought process, since my mind works a lot more similarly to students' minds than does the Official Guide editor's!

One pretty big strategic point that everyone can take away on this - if one or more of the answer choices uses "that of" or "those of", you have to make a decision about parallelism - you either need to have a possessive relationship or you don't, so you can specifically look for that.

Here, we need it: each answer choice already uses "their voice", and because there's a possessive quality to "their", then we need to use "that/those of" to get a proper comparison.

As you're scanning questions for decision points, the that/those of point is a good one to recognize!

rg1 · Answer

It should be C. 
'utterances' is plural and therefore B and E are out.
A and D have illogical comparison.

People in the north central region of the United States use

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